Meet the mystic who started a Utopian community at Fountaingrove in 1875

When Thomas Lake Harris moved to Sonoma County in 1875, there was something different about him. Perhaps it was the Englishman’s magnetic personality, his persuasive oratorical skills, his poetry or his Merlinesque beard.

Whatever you want to call it, Harris was a skilled man. He convinced a small group of followers to leave New York, fund his plans and move across the country with him to Santa Rosa.

Harris became the founder of Fountaingrove, which he began as a Utopian community he founded in 1875 after purchasing 400 acres of land north of Santa Rosa. He was called a prophet, mystic, a minister and a preacher. Some people flat-out called him a cult leader.

He led the Brotherhood of New Life religious group. He believed in spiritual counterparts and expressed desire for peace in the world.

“For nearly half a century I have been dreaming a lovely dream of the New Harmonic Civilization; of the ending of all feuds, the vanishment of all diseases, the abolishment of all antagonisms, the removal of all squalors and poverties, in a fulfilled Christian era; a new golden age of universal peace: as one,” Harris wrote in 1891.

Harris’s attraction to Santa Rosa was rooted in his interest in winemaking. He grew a vineyard and operated the Fountain Grove Winery, which became one of the top producing wineries in California by the late 19th century.

By his side throughout his time in Sonoma County, and before then, was Kanaye Nagasawa, one of the first Japanese immigrants in the U.S. and a brilliant winemaker in his own right. Their Fountain Grove Winery complex included a large manor Harris resided in.

Harris claimed longtime celibacy, preached God was bisexual and declared himself immortal. After unfavorable coverage in San Francisco newspapers, Harris left Fountaingrove in 1892. He died in 1906.

The Fountaingrove estate and the Utopian colony was left in Nagasawa’s care until his own death in 1934. A highlight among Nagasawa’s cultural contributions was when he commissioned the iconic Fountaingrove Round Barn to be built in 1899.

The last ruins of the Fountain Grove Winery were demolished in 2015, and the Round Barn was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire.

See photos in the gallery above of Thomas Lake Harris and the Fountaingrove community and winery.