Fountaingrove Parkway

The neighborhood of Fountaingrove gets its name from Thomas Lake Harris who bought 1500 acres of land on a  hill on the northeast side of Santa Rosa and established a utopian community there in the mid-1870's. His sect built a successful wine-making operation, producung wine which was sold across the United States and Europe before its last members disbanded in the 1930's. A large round barn, painted red, once stabled horses used in the wine making operation, became  a historical landmark.  Fountaingrove got its start as a residential community in the early 1980's. Here is an interesting history of the Round Barn and the community that built it.

 When we looked at a lot in the late 1990's there was still an annual surcharge attached to the purchase price to cover the cost of construction of the parkway. We never bought the lot for a variety of reasons, and in 2017 Fountaingrove was the epicenter of the  Tubbs Fire which burned for 123 days and destroyed  or damaged almost 6,000 structures, including homes, the Fountaingrove Inn and the historic Round Barn.

 The Nuns Fire broke out in a field in the community of Glen Ellen when strong winds knocked a tree into a powerline conductor. It merged with the Tubbs fire and is the fire that burned on the ridge above our house. We were evacuated for almost two weeks before that part of the fire was contained.

We drive over the Fountaingrove Parkway at least once a week and its history, though not exactly ancient is certainly interesting. The utopian  sect that settled there was probably the beginning of the wine industry in Sonoma County, and modern day neighborhood of Fountaingrove eventually became home to many of the town's well heeled professionals. Although many homes there have been rebuilt, Santa Rosa still suffers from a shortage of doctors and other professionals who chose to leave the city rather than rebuild.

There was and continues to be much controversy over the Fountaingrove  neighborhood as it was the center of a similar fire in 1964. The city has an ordinance which prohibits building on hilltop ridges but that seems to have been largely forgotten and doesn't seem to be enforced anymore.