Fort Ross was never just a fort. It was the hub of a constellation of Russian settlements along the northern California coast that official documents called "Fortress Ross." A port at Bodega Bay served as the colony's harbor. A sealing station operated on the Farallon Islands, eighteen miles out to sea from San Francisco. By 1830, three small farming communities - ranchos named Chernykh, Khlebnikov, and Kostromitinov - dotted the inland valleys near present-day Graton and Bodega. The purpose was twofold: hunt the sea otters whose pelts fetched fortunes in the China trade, and grow the food that Russian Alaska desperately needed but could not produce. California offered both, and Spain's claim over the territory was more nominal than enforced. The Russians built a stockade, barracks, a commandant's house, and a chapel - the first Russian Orthodox church in North America outside Alaska.

The community that formed at Fort Ross was remarkable for its diversity. Russian managers directed operations, but the labor force included Aleut hunters brought from Alaska, local Kashaya Pomo workers, and Alaskan Creoles of mixed heritage. Kashaya women married Russian men, creating families that bridged enormous cultural distances. Unlike the Spanish mission system to the south, the Russians did not attempt to convert or concentrate Native peoples by force - though the relationship was far from equal. The 1817 treaty between the Russian-American Company and Kashaya Pomo chiefs was the first such agreement concluded with Native peoples in California. Russian scientists at the colony became among the first to document California's natural and cultural history. The managers introduced European innovations - glass windows, stoves, all-wood housing - to Alta California. In 1821, the crew of the Russian-American Company vessel Kutuzov, arriving from Callao, Peru, performed California's first vaccination, inoculating 54 people against smallpox.

The sea otter, once numbering in the hundreds of thousands along the Pacific coast, was the colony's reason for existing and the cause of its collapse. International over-hunting drove the population toward commercial extinction by the 1830s. Agricultural yields on the foggy coast never met expectations. When the Russian-American Company signed a trade agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1838 to supply the Alaskan colonies from Fort Vancouver and Fort Langley, Fort Ross lost its last strategic purpose. The Russians offered the settlement to the Mexican government, which declined. In 1841, the colony was sold to John Sutter - the Swiss-born Mexican citizen who would become famous seven years later when gold was discovered at his lumber mill in the Sacramento Valley. The price was $30,000, and whether Sutter ever fully paid remains a matter of dispute between American and Russian historians. His agent, Peter Burnett, reportedly settled the debt in 1849 with $19,788 in notes and gold.

The fort that visitors see today is largely reconstruction. Highway 1 once ran directly through the stockade, entering where the Kuskov House stood and exiting through the main gate; the road was diverted in the late 1970s. The chapel collapsed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was rebuilt in 1916, burned in 1970, and was reconstructed again - though it still lacks the copper-clad cupola and red-metal roof depicted in an 1841 watercolor by the Russian naturalist Voznesensky. Only the Rotchev House, residence of the last Russian manager, survives as an original structure. On the ridge above, archaeologists in 1990-1992 excavated the fort's cemetery, identifying 135 graves. Half were children, who by 1838 represented nearly half the settlement's population. Bodies lay in redwood coffins, many with Orthodox crosses or religious medallions, but the acidic soil had done its work on the bones. The Kashaya Pomo, consulted during the excavation, maintained oral accounts that their ancestors had been removed from the Russian cemetery for traditional cremation burial.

Fort Ross State Historic Park now covers 3,000 acres of the Sonoma coast. The reconstructed stockade contains the chapel with its distinctive onion dome, the barracks, and the commandant's house. Outside the walls, a large orchard includes several trees planted by the Russians nearly two centuries ago. The park offers hiking, tide pools, and whale watching, and Fort Ross Reef has become a popular scuba diving destination - the wreckage of the SS Pomona lies just offshore. A working replica of the colony's windmill, the first in California history, was dedicated in 2012 during the settlement's bicentennial celebration, which drew over 6,500 people. That same year, a Kashaya Pomo delegation traveled to Russia for the first time, visiting the homeland of the people who had once settled on theirs. The name Metini, what the Kashaya called this place before the Russians arrived, has not been forgotten. It is still the Kashaya word for this land.