Alex Gloria rented a space at the Mill for years. Often you could see him sitting out under one of the huge old oak trees talking with fellow renters or working on a car. He knew my father, Jack Dahlstrom and had sat under that same tree with him shooting the breeze many years ago. He still remembered my Dad's logic in cutting the middle out of the trusses of that building so that he could fit heavy construction equipment into it. Hearing him talk about my Dad just adds another layer to all the memories we've heard about at the Mill.
Alex Gloria's is another pole barn building and part of the larger pole barn building known as the Hay Barn. We tried saving some of posts by leaving it in place so people would know what it had looked like before and have a sense of the history of the barn. However, whatever the poles were dipped in smelled so toxic once we'd insulated the new building, we had to remove them. Instead we've lined many of the walls in Alex Gloria's with wood that was taken out of one of the southern buildings. It had originally been flooring in a building that couldn't be salvaged, so we carefully pulled it up, stacked it, and took it to Vintage Mill, in East Austin to be re-milled. We can't wait to hear what people think.