The red barn at Grovers Mill has changed so little since 1938 that even a Martian invader would probably recognize the hamlet’s most iconic building. But a project two years in the making has completely overhauled the inside of the historic two-story structure that sits at the intersection of Millstone and Cranbury roads, dividing its once cavernous interior into three apartments and three offices.
Owner Carl Van Dyke believes the barn to be about 160 years old, based on techniques used in its construction. Originally, the barn was owned in common with the 18th-century mill across the street that gives the village its name. Later, it was a feed and farmer’s supply store and until Van Dyke bought it in 2010, it was home to Grover’s Mill Co., a lawnmower sales and repair business.
Located in a residential zone, the building might have been ripe for a tear down. By preserving the historic details, however, Van Dyke was able to win Zoning Board approval for his “adaptive-reuse.” But the visitors who occasionally stop by at the Grover’s Mill barn from as far away as Japan are not interested in apartments or office space. They want to see the place where Mars invaded.
Grover’s Mill became a household name in America on Halloween Eve, 1938, when Orson Welles narrated a Mercury Theater Company radio drama. The story was an adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells science fiction story about invaders from Mars. Welles and the broadcast team gave the story all kinds of modern touches that added verisimilitude. It was framed as a news broadcast, with emergency bulletins about the Martian attack interrupting a live orchestra concert.
To pick a site for the invasion, the broadcasters stabbed a pencil into a map at random, hitting Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The broadcast began with an interview with Welles as a Princeton University professor describing strange eruptions of gas from Mars and a few minutes later, a meteor hitting Grover’s Mill. The “meteor” turned out to be a metal cylinder, out of which emerged a fearsome Martian fighting machine that immolated onlookers with a “heat ray,” and destroyed the American military forces sent against it.
A “panicked reporter” described the chaos:
“A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? There’s a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they’re turning into flame!”
Many who tuned in did not hear the disclaimer thought the news of alien invasion was real. A few Princeton students who heard about the meteor, and other curiosity seekers, reportedly went to Grover’s Mill, where they found a group of farmers armed with shotguns, getting ready to defend their town against the Martians.
There is even a legend that some visitors mistook a metal water tower for an alien war machine and shot it to pieces.
The story about the residents coming to the defense of their town and blasting the tower, which rises on spindly metal legs just like the alien walkers Welles described, is a compelling one. But the tale is most likely apocryphal.
In 2010 the nonprofit Committee for Skeptical Inquiry investigated the oft-repeated story about local farmers shooting the water tower and concluded it was probably not true. None of the contemporary newspaper articles written about the panic caused by the radio drama mention anyone opening fire on the water tower, and residents at the time told reporters the village was peaceful and quiet the night Mars attacked.
The War of the Worlds story is commemorated with a bronze plaque in Van Nest Park. But it was the barn’s pre-1938 history that interested Van Dyke.
“The barn was very attractive to me because it’s an old, historic structure in town, and when you go into it and see the nature of the space, particularly on the second floor, with its open post-and-beam structure, it struck me as something that would lend itself to redevelopment. It’s an interesting and neat structure in a great location,” he said. “We’re not only preserving history, but also really redesigning the space to be useful.”
The barn is the first commercial development project for Van Dyke, who grew up in White Plains, NY, where his father was in the business of radiology and related medical equipment, and his mother was an English teacher and office manager. Van Dyke went to the University of Pennsylvania for mechanical engineering and then earned a master’s in civil engineering at M.I.T.
A resident of of Snowbird Court (his wife is Louisa Ho, the Girl Scout leader and their two children are at High School South), Van Dyke has spent most of his career making computer tools to make freight rail networks run more efficiently. He currently works as a senior partner for the West Windsor-based Oliver Wyman consulting firm, and previously owned his own company, MultiModal.
Tools like the kind he developed help rail managers make better decisions based on up-to-date information, he said. Van Dyke has used his talents to improve the freight rail systems in the United States, Canada, Russia and countries in Africa.
Van Dyke said compared to the complexity of that job, redeveloping Grover’s Mill Barn was supposed to be an enjoyable distraction. Van Dyke founded a company, Martian Holdings LLC, and bought the barn. The rookie property developer did not anticipate how complicated his side project would become.
Van Dyke declined to reveal how much it cost to renovate the structure, saying only that it was “very expensive” to overhaul the building to modern building codes while preserving its historic character. There were several unexpected challenges.
While redesigning the inside of the building, Van Dyke was careful to preserve its classic appearance. Among the most noticeable features of the old barn were the white-on-red doors facing Cranbury Road. Van Dyke kept those in place, though they no longer function as doors. Another iconic feature was the sign that said “Grovers Mill – Co.” Van Dyke kept the sign, but changed it to read “Grovers Mill.” Van Dyke said they used as much of the original wood as possible. The beams and rafters of hemlock, white oak, and Douglas fir are exposed and frame the vaulted ceilings on the second floor.
The entire project was designed by architect Kyle Paul Van Dyke (no relation to Carl.) Kyle Van Dyke, of KVD+ Architecture on Alexander Street in Princeton, said the barn was built on a rubble foundation. One of the first orders of business after Carl Van Dyke purchased the property was to pour a concrete foundation under the barn. To do that, engineers had to lift the barn one section at a time and pour the concrete underneath it. A video of the process is online at kvdstudio.wordpress.com.
Although Grover’s Mill was Carl’s first big project, Kyle is an old hand at rebuilding old barns. He was the architect of the restoration of the historic barn on West Windsor’s Schenck farmstead.
At Grover’s Mill, workers renovated the entire inside of the building, tearing apart the old walls and floorboards, constructing new walls and floors and adding modern electrical and heating and air conditioning systems, as well as an automatic sprinkler system. High efficiency windows and insulation make the barn much more environmentally friendly than its earlier, draftier incarnations. Carl Van Dyke said he had hoped to possibly find some historic artifacts tucked away in the barn, but that was not to be the case.
“As we pulled out floorboards, we found various dessicated dead animals that had died a decade earlier, which the kids found a certain fascination with,” Carl Van Dyke said.
He added he would have preferred the entire building to be used for commercial space, but the 18 available parking spaces wouldn’t support an entire commercial building. However, he said he is very pleased with how the apartments turned out.
“I think it’s a nice attractive building, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to preserve an iconic structure in West Windsor,” he said. The office space is accessible from the south entrance. There are two offices on the first floor and a loft office upstairs on the West side of the barn, totaling 2,670 square feet. They can either be separate or part of one office, as required by the tenant, Kyle Van Dyke said, but cannot be used for retail or medical businesses.
The entire first floor is wheelchair accessible. The apartments, which range in size from 690 to 845 square feet, are accessed from the North side. The east side of the first floor of the barn has been made into a handicapped-accessible studio renting for $1,250 a month. The upstairs lofts are pricier, going for $1,350 and $1,450.
West Windsor Township land use manager Sam Surtees said the township zoning board was willing to let Van Dyke use the barn for a commercial purpose even though the building is zoned residential, as long as he preserved the historic look of the building.
“The applicant was willing to spend the extra money to comply with what the board wanted,” he said. “Even though it’s zoned residential, there’s always been a non-residential use on the property.” Keeping the red barn was preferable to knocking it down and building houses there, he said.
“It’s a good re-adaptive use, and it would have been torn down if we didn’t get an investor like Carl Van Dyke to do what he did,” Surtees said.
Surtees said the barn was not on any register of historic places. “There’s nothing historic about it in terms of unique architecture or anything like that,” Surtees said. “What’s unique about it is that when the War of the Worlds radio broadcast took place in 1938, right behind the barn is the old wooden water tower that was shot at by farmers who thought it was one of the alien war machines.”
Even so, the barn figures heavily into War of the Worlds lore. Plainsboro artist Robert Hummel painted a mural showing the barn, in perfect detail, being set ablaze by a tripod fighting machine, with the infamous water tower in the background. The painting now hangs in the Grover’s Mill Coffee House in the Southfield Shopping Center along with other Wellesian memorabilia.
There will also be a nod to War-of-the-Worlds history in the barn’s lobby. Planks were salvaged and reused as wainscotting and Van Dyke gave some of the wood to Hummel to frame prints of his War of the Worlds painting. In return, Hummel gave Van Dyke a print, which he plans to hang in the lobby along with other artifacts from the barn’s past. Van Dyke also found grain chutes and augers from when the building was a feed store, and he is still trying to figure out what to do with them.
War of the Worlds-obsessed tourists and film crews from as far away as Japan regularly visit the barn to capture images of the landing site. The project got a good review from Franc Gambatese, owner of the Grover’s Mill Coffee House and War of the Worlds history buff. Gambatese said he eyed buying the barn two years ago when he was looking for a place to open a coffee shop.
“It was pretty much a Norman Rockwell setting,” Gambatese said. “It was a big part of the story of the town, and probably the most recognizable building in the area.”
Gambatese said the building was too expensive for him, so he opened for business in the Southfield Center instead. “I’m glad the new owners decided to rehabilitate the building,” he said. “The character is a little bit different, but at least the spirit is there. You know you’re in Grover’s Mill when you drive around the corner and you see it.”
The barn isn’t the only iconic structure on the block. Apartment residents will be able to see the other one from the north and east windows of the building. It’s on the neighboring property, behind a stately white farm house. On a winter’s day, you can see it in the stand of trees, looming overhead on legs of steel, looking, in the right light, like it just might be ready to move, ready to raise a heat ray and begin the annihilation of the human race. But really, it’s only a water tower.
For more information about leasing space at the barn, visit groversmillbarn.com.
