Votaw Building

When the Votaw Building was constructed in 1905 on the corner of Second Street and Monterey Road, Morgan Hill was a young town just starting out. It was built by  Albert Shaw Votaw from Oklahoma, as the Bank of Morgan Hill. Votaw was the bank’s first president and later Morgan Hill’s first mayor. Its opening coincided with the town’s 1906 incorporation. The building is two stories of sturdy stucco in the Italian Renaissance style at a time when most of the surrounding streets were still unpaved dirt. 

The Bank of Morgan Hill gave local farmers, ranchers, and merchants a place to keep their money without having to travel to San Jose or Gilroy. For a small valley town growing on prune orchards and vineyard ambition, a local bank was no small thing.

Before long, that corner bank caught the attention of A.P. Giannini, a San Francisco banker, who bought the building and replaced the Bank of Morgan Hill with a branch of the Bank of Italy. Giannini believed that working people, immigrants included, deserved access to credit and savings, not just the wealthy. The Italian families, who had been settling the valley in those early years, now had a banker who spoke their language. The Bank of Italy would one day grow into Bank of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

One year after the Votaw Building opened, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake shook the entire region. Morgan Hill felt the tremors, and the building cracked under the strain. It was repaired and reopened. Then, nearly eighty years later, in April 1984, a 6.2 earthquake struck even closer to Morgan Hill. The old building shuddered again, and once again it was patched up and put back to work, showing that the Votaw Building had been constructed to last.

Today, the ground floor of the Votaw Building houses a café rather than a bank. But much remains unchanged in more than a century of Morgan Hill's history.