Around 1859, Capt. John Grigsby built the core of the Webber House on Finnell Ranch about a mile east of Yountville. In the 1860s, the house to its current location in Yountville.

Grigsby had led a wagon train which brought many of the earliest pioneer families to Napa County in 1845. He served in the Bear Flag Revolt and escorted the Vallejos to Sutter's Fort under guard.

Grigsby returned East in 1861, but his son Sylvester remained.

In 1905, John Lee Webber bought the house and his family moved here from their ranch. He built the barn in 1905 and enlarged the house to its current form in 1907.

Webber had moved from Maine to Virginia City, Nevada in 1870 then to Napa County in 1876. For sixteen years, he engaged in the mixed agriculture of the period: hay and grain, vegetables and livestock. In 1904, he was elected County Supervisor.

As Supervisor, Webber successfully advocated for the replacement of wooden bridges with stone bridges. As a result, Napa County became known as the "County of Stone Bridges."

Renovation of the house was completed in 1979.

Source: Adapted from the NRHP nomination submitted in 1982.

When we photographed the building in 2010, it housed a bed and breakfast inn.

Buildings that Moved

It's not just that the people of the American West are restless, the buildings themselves sometimes pack up and move when - for one reason or another - the neighborhood no longer suits them or the neighbors no longer want them or opportunity waits down the road.

And when buildings remain in place, they are often searching for their identities.

Of the buildings and structures we have visited, the original Reno Arch holds the record for number of moves. It has been moved five times since it was built in 1926.

Jax Truckee Diner holds the distance title. The building moved from New Jersry to Pennsylvanis in 1948, then from Pennsylvania to Califonia in 1992.

Probably the most ambitious relocation occurred on July 4th 1904, when the Southern Pacific Railroad loaded most of the town of Wadsworth, Nevada, onto rail cars and transported the town thirty miles west to create a new town which became known as Sparks.