I moved to the northern reaches of California’s Sonoma County, known as the Russian River, in 2008 and eventually settled in a house, built in 1930, in the midst of an ancient orchard.  Peaches, pears, plums, persimmons, walnuts, grapes, apples, figs—an incredible cornucopia, which gave without prompting, drew me to this enchanted orchard in a sunny enclave by a river—and led me to wonder who planted it, abandoned it, and why.  I asked around, but none of my white-trash neighbors had a clue: The hippies who took over what had once been San Francisco’s summer playground neither knew nor cared about the past.

But the clues were all around me, in the Russian Orthodox church up the road, its onion dome rising amid the redwoods clotted with wisteria; in the slanted crosses of the local cemetery; and in the Russian names of some of the neighborhood’s summer residents.

The church, I learned, is the Church of the Holy Virgin of Kazan.  I saw the priest only once, walking through the neighborhood with his long beard and black robe trailing wistfully in the wind, and went over one Sunday only to learn that the priest was gone, along with his flock: Services were discontinued long ago.  The trail petered out, and yet an aura of mystery hung over this haunted orchard—and the ghosts of a forgotten past begged to be disinterred.  There’s no better tool for such disinterring than Google, which finally, after several sporadic efforts, yielded the truth.

My orchard was the byproduct of the last efforts of the Russian Empire to extend its reach into North America.  At the turn of the 19th century, the czars turned their attention to the competition for colonies that had preoccupied their European rivals for most of the preceding century.  They moved into Siberia and Kamchatka, then crossed the straits into Alaska, and from there the Russian-American Company turned southward.

The Alaskan colony was ill equipped to feed itself, and its efforts to till the harsh soil yielded poor results, so Russian explorers and officials set off in search of provisions, winding up, in 1811, where the Russian River meets the sea.  Ivan Kuskov was the first such pioneer to chart the river’s course, and he named it Slavyanka (Slavic Lady).  Fort Rossiya (now Fort Ross) was established in the early part of the century, and in 1841 a Russian expedition mapped the river’s tributaries and established several ranches that specialized in agricultural production.  While historians and archaeologists have long tried to locate these ranches precisely, their exact location remains mysterious.  But circumstantial evidence, including the variety and longevity of the trees in my orchard, point to Vacation Beach (as its now known) as one of these long-lost settlements.

Kuskov chose the site for Ross, the Russian headquarters in California, which was in the territory of the Kashaya Indians.  Unlike the emissaries of the Spanish king, who claimed all the land north of San Francisco, the Russians treated the natives relatively fairly.  Indians in the employ of the Russian-American Company were actually paid, rather than conscripted, and lodging, food, and clothing were provided.  As the historian Stephen Watrous points out, “The coastal Indians . . . viewed the Russian presence as a safeguard against the Spanish (or Mexicans) and against other Indians entering their territory.”

Like all mercantilist operations, the Russian-American Company required an ideological reason for its existence, and while the British East India Company—on which it was modeled—had the white man’s burden of British imperialism, the Russians talked themselves into a similar rationale.  Alongside their efforts to mine—and eventually exterminate—the sea otters who thrived in those days on the northern coast, the Russians undertook to convert the Indians to Orthodoxy.  Churches were built of virgin redwood, parishes were established, and schools were set up where religious instruction was provided in native languages.  Indeed, the Church championed the cause of Native Americans long before it became politically correct, lobbying for land rights and protecting the Indians from the depredations of Spanish cruelty and indifference.

The Russian colony, however, was soon cut off at the source, as the Third Rome turned inward and confronted the inner rot that would end the reign of the Romanovs.  The Russian-American Company sold Ft. Ross to the Spanish for a paltry $3,000, and Johann Augustus Sutter bought the company’s assets in 1841, when the last Russian commander sailed home.

The colony was absorbed, slowly but surely, into the American multicultural miasma, its achievements and legacy forgotten.  The only traces left are embedded in the natural world—in the springtime clouds of white plum blossoms and the gnarled apple trees faithfully yielding their harvest to the indifferent habitués of Vacation Beach.