National Register of Historic Places
Pond Farm Pottery
Guerneville vicinity, Sonoma County, California
The record
- Listed
- June 17, 2014
- Type
- Historic district
- Address
- 17000 Armstrong Woods Rd., Guerneville vicinity
- County
- Sonoma
- State
- California
- Contributing resources
- 3 buildings, 1 structure, 1 site, 3 objects
- Coordinates
- 38.55070, -123.00205
- Reference number
- 14000307
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.
The outline is the area recorded for this listing in National Park Service map data, drawn approximately.
David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesAmerican Geographical Society Library, UW-MilwaukeeDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries
The story
Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com
Pond Farm Pottery is a historic district near Guerneville, in Sonoma County, California, on Armstrong Woods Road. Its buildings date from about 1870 to 1962, in a modern style known as California Modernism.
Why it's listed
It is listed under criteria A, B and C, with national-level significance in art, education and social history. It was evaluated under Criteria Consideration G, and the nomination gives its period of significance as 1942 to 1985, when Marguerite Wildenhain occupied the house there.
Physical character
The barn was remodeled into a studio in 1942 using salvage materials, and architect Albert Lanier remodeled the house and designed a new guest house in 1962. Walls are redwood siding or board and batten on wood-post or concrete foundations, and surviving features include a kiln, a kiln enclosure, and paving embedded with pottery shards.
Historical context
Leonidas Walker acquired the land by patent in 1875 and ranched it until 1939, when John and Eva Walker sold most of the property to Gordon and Jane Herr, who began buying additional land in 1942, and the Pond Farm Workshops operated there from 1949 to 1953. Wildenhain, who emigrated from Holland in 1940 after the Nazi invasion, moved to Pond Farm in 1942, bought several acres from Gordon in 1956, and ran Pond Farm Pottery there until her death in 1985.