The Log Barn Rising Above Little Beach Park Started With a Main Street Building Minturn Lost

"You can look at the Meyer's Barn and see the hand cuts on the corners, and the hand-hewn logs, and you can just imagine what that was like, to build that thing," Ken Halliday told the Vail Daily in August 2023. At the time the barn still stood on private property at 25 Harrison Avenue. Three years later it is being reconstructed at upper Little Beach Park, above the amphitheater. The Town of Minturn reported significant progress over the summer and says work will pick up again in spring and summer 2027.

Once it is finished, the barn is meant to fill a gap the town had already drawn into its plans for the park. The rescue happened because Minturn had built a preservation process for itself after losing a building it valued on Main Street.

A Main Street building came down first

On July 15, 2019, developers demolished the old red Mountain Pedaler building at 161 Main Street. According to the Vail Daily, they did not know how much the building meant to the town's history. The same report says the loss pushed residents to protect other pieces of the town's past and led to the creation of Minturn's Historic Preservation Commission. The commission held its first official meeting on Jan. 6, 2022.

The town then set up the tools that let a commission do more than talk. A December 2023 Town memo says Minturn became a Certified Local Government on February 28, 2023, and that by the time the memo was written, the town had application processes for landmarks, districts, alterations, relocations and demolitions. The same memo names the town's water tank as Minturn's first historic landmark nomination and designation.

The Mountain Pedaler also moved Kelly Toon. He is an architect, a 20-year Minturn resident and a member of the commission. The Vail Daily reported that the demolition got him thinking about how to save the barn on Harrison Avenue.

The barn on Harrison Avenue

The barn measures 17 by 27 feet. It was built by hand from local pine logs and used to house horses. The Town calls it the largest log barn left in Minturn. It dates to the late 1800s and was built in the log style brought to North America from Europe, used from the late 1600s into the early 1900s.

The barn takes its name from the Meyer family, who settled on the property in the early 1890s. The Vail Daily says the family helped build early Minturn. Ralph Meyer ran the Lionshead Garage in Minturn from 1937 through 1972, and his wife, Irene, ran Grammy's Attic. A 2023 commission record includes a family member's memory that Ralph Meyer recalled horses being ridden in and out of the barn.

The push to move it came from an ordinary request. In a March 2023 commission discussion, Kelly Toon reported that the property owner wanted to add a garage and to relocate the barn. The same record says the owner was willing to donate the structure along with a couple thousand dollars.

Toon took the idea to Halliday, who chaired the Historic Preservation Commission, and to Woody Woodruff, the former chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission. On Aug. 2, 2023, the five Town Council members present voted unanimously to make the barn a historic landmark. Toon told the Vail Daily he had been thinking of Steamboat's barn, the one on all its classic postcards, and that Minturn could have "the same little landmark building."

The park had already drawn a building that size

Landmark status protected the barn. It did not give the barn a new home, and Little Beach Park was the early favorite because the public could use it there.

The park already had a plan with a spot for it. The volunteers' April 7, 2025 letter to Minturn Planning and Zoning points out that the Little Beach Park Sub-Area Master Plan was approved in 2023, the same year as the barn's landmark vote. That plan calls for a concession and multipurpose building, about the size of the barn, in the parking lot at the top of the amphitheater. The team's stated goal is to make the Meyer's Barn that building.

In May 2025, Town staff recommended moving the barn to 801 Cemetery Road, the Little Beach Park address, and pointed to the same sub-area master plan. For the park, this solves two problems at once. The site plan needed a small building, and the town's largest remaining log barn needed somewhere to stand.

The Minturn Community Fund has been part of the amphitheater from the beginning. The fund says its board won a grant in 2005 to build the Little Beach Park amphitheater and started the free Thursday-night summer concerts in 2011. The same organization is now the fiscal sponsor for the barn. The fund started in 1996 as community fundraising for the volunteer fire department and became a 501(c)(3) in 2002.

Taken apart log by log

The team weighed two ways to move the barn. They could take it apart and rebuild it, with some worry that the old wood might not go back together the way it should, or they could put it on a trailer in one piece. At the Oct. 15, 2024 commission hearing, according to the meeting minutes, the applicant said moving it whole had been considered but taking it apart made more financial sense. The commission approved a Certificate of Appropriateness with two conditions: a Design Review Board application and a plaque telling the barn's history.

The April 2025 letter lists Phase I in four steps:

1. Dig and pour a concrete foundation at the new site.
2. Take apart the roof and barn logs at Harrison Avenue.
3. Move the roof and logs to the park.
4. Reassemble the log walls and roof on the new foundation.

The 2025 site application calls for reusing the logs and roof materials where practical, replacing several logs that rotted where they met the ground, and adding a steel center beam to strengthen the roof. The team estimated $35,000 for Phase I and wrote that the money had been raised through the Minturn Community Fund. Back in 2023 the plan was for grants and donations to pay for the work, not the Town.

The schedule has moved several times:

The Town's September update includes progress photos and thanks Toon, Halliday and Woodruff for "numerous hours" of volunteer work. It describes the project as a collaboration between the Town and the Minturn Community Fund.

What 2027 picks up

Phase II starts after the barn is back together. The volunteer letter describes working with Town staff to finish the inside and out. That means preparing for electric and water and sewer hookups once those services reach the site, plus flooring, chinking between the exterior logs, and windows and doors. Each step needs its own approvals, and more money may have to be raised. The concession and multipurpose use is still the team's plan, not a finished design. In 2023, the ideas also included space for history displays and storage.

The barn's next work season lines up with the park's busiest time. The Town's concert page describes the free Thursday series at Little Beach Park from 6 to 8 p.m. Picnics, blankets, low chairs and leashed dogs are welcome, and glass is not allowed. If the 2027 work goes as planned, the building the master plan drew for the concert grounds will be going up at the top of the amphitheater, built from logs cut in the 1800s.

The barn also shows that Minturn's preservation process has kept working. Town records show a 2024 landmark nomination for 478 Eagle River Street, and another for the property at 151 Main Street, known as the Nelson House.

Closer at hand, the Town calendar lists November First Friday for Friday, Nov. 6, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., with more details to come.

Interested in Minturn's older buildings and how preservation work like this shapes the streets around them? Adam Bartlett follows Minturn's Historic Preservation Commission and Town updates closely, and he's glad to talk through what's changing on Main Street and around Little Beach Park. Request a Free Vail Valley Market Consultation.