Historic Fort Ross

8/23/10
Fort Ross
I stopped at Historic Fort Ross, to get a little bit of the history of the area.  Historic Fort Ross was built by the Russians, when they held part of California.  I’m not sure all of it is the original fort--some of it might be reconstructed--but it is very impressive, in any case.  Apparently, while the Mexicans were moving from south to north along the coast, the Russians were moving north to south along the same coast, from Alaska.  The Russians brought along native hunters from Alaska to hunt seals and sea otters with devastating effect:  until recently, the north American sea otter was thought to be extinct.  At Fort Ross, which is only about 80 miles north of San Francisco, the Russians built such a well-fortified fort that the Spanish could not move them.

This is one of the guard towers--there are two, one looking out to sea and the other looking inland.

All of the buildings are not there any longer, but there are several, including the chapel, still in existence.  The soldiers were, of course, Russian Orthodox, so there is an icon where western churches would have a cross.

The chapel has an interesting barrel shaped dome in the ceiling.  Unfortunately, the informative plaques did not tell me why.  I would be interested to know if this had some significance in the religion.  I would think it does have some significance, since none of the other buildings have anything like it.

 The dome is not for a bell, since the chapel bell is outside the door of the chapel.

Here are three views of the cannon.  They are, now, in what would be the courtyard of the fort, but I'm sure they were kept in the guard towers in order to ward off attackers.  Also, there are only four cannon on display.  I wonder if they only had two for each guard tower?

 The gun, itself, is very small. 
There was nothing to say how big a shot it would take or how far it would throw it.  I expected cannon to be larger.

This is the armory, which is in the building that is marked as being a hotel and the commanding officer’s quarters. If they kept this many muskets, surely two cannon would not be enough--or maybe I'm just into overkill.