This is a creepy dilapidated remnant of a winery. It is burn damaged in one of the large buildings. The rest is heavily graffiti'd & succumbing to the ravages of nature. The main building is built into a hill & is slowly tearing down the rear wall. The entire outside is covered in blackberry bushes and they were very tasty. We also got the s**t scared out of us by a huge ass buck. Not sure how he got in the fence line.

In 1860 a fellow named Thomas Lake Harris formed an organization called the Brotherhood of the New Life. He got a good deal on the Fountaingrove land and built a mansion for himself, two separate huge living quarters for the men and women of his cult, and the enormous winery. Although his wine was internationally known and drank, the New Life was the real backbone and underbelly of the winery and Fountaingrove area.

Harris’ cult, like most cults, had strange tenets and rules. The Brotherhood believed in turning over all material wealth to Harris, who assumed his supreme divinity. Emphasis was also placed on deep breathing and refraining for sex until finding the chosen celestial mate. How one decided what that meant exactly, I’m not sure. Harris also apparently wrote really lousy poetry and sent it out to people all over the world.

But the Brotherhood couldn’t last forever. A traveling writer started a community flare-up with an alleged expose of Fountaingrove, “revealing” that Harris had been sleeping with all the women in his cult. No one knows if it was true or if the traveling writer just wanted an ego boost and found it in spreading gossip. Nevertheless, Thomas Lake Harris was basically forced into leaving town, and he left the winery to his Japanese assistant, Kanawe Nagasawa, who ran it quite successfully until his death in 1934.

Since a large fire burned half the winery in 1991, a fence has been surrounding the grounds.


Above info from bohemian.com