California’s First Mysterious Cult Scandal Happened in Santa Rosa

It’s no secret that America is fascinated with cults and their scamming, grifting leaders. Viewers flock to TV series like Wild Wild Country, The Vow and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, and elevate con artists like the Tinder swindler and Elizabeth Holmes as antiheroes who’ve found loopholes in American society and business.

If you want to find the roots of this fascination, there’s no better place to look than Northern California, with its deep history of communes and cults. At the center of the region’s first-ever international cult scandal was the Brotherhood of the New Life and its mystic leader Thomas Lake Harris, whose followers settled in 1875 into a colony in the golden hills just north of Santa Rosa.

Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal and California’s First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison (Oxford University Press, 2025) provides a definitive account of the forces that eventually drove Harris out of town. It also traces the genesis of Harris’ strange religious philosophies and, through surviving accounts of the colony, the coexistence of standard-issue winemaking alongside bizarre beliefs and practices.

Harris used his followers’ wealth to purchase land and live lavishly, in exchange for administering his belief system of “divine respiration” mixed with Swedenborgian philosophies. He held that each living person had a “celestial counterpart” in heaven, and must refrain from sexual activity until finding the right person on Earth, a vessel to their celestial counterpart, to have sex with. (This person was chosen, naturally, by Harris himself.)

Harris named the Santa Rosa land Fountaingrove, and built an ornate mansion for himself along with twin buildings separating his male and female followers. At an adjoining Fountaingrove winery, Harris’ protégé Kanaye Nagasawa, a young man from a wealthy samurai family now recognized as one of the first Japanese immigrants to the United States, made wines that were known internationally.

Paddison tells Harris’ story from its beginning in upstate New York, at the time a hotbed of self-proclaimed seers and prophets, including Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Harris started a colony called Mountain Cove — a phonetic precursor to Fountaingrove — and after its collapse established another on the shores of Lake Erie. So persuasive were his teachings that a member of British Parliament, Laurence Oliphant, would leave his post to join Harris.

Oliphant later accused Harris of bilking him out of all of his money, and sued, somewhat successfully, to get it back. This drove the Brotherhood of the New Life across the country to Santa Rosa, where Harris continued to write erotic poetry; claim that a female deity, Queen Lily of the Conjugal Angels, lived inside his body alongside his own spirit; and, according to accounts, overstep the physical space of visiting women.

One such woman, Alzire Chevaillier, visited Harris to stay at his satellite house east of town. Though she spent relatively little time with Harris himself during her long stay, when she left, she devoted her time to exposing Harris as a manipulative fraud in newspaper accounts and pleas to the governor.

In a packed public lecture in San Francisco, Chevaillier talked of “Edenic baths given by opposite sexes to each other,” and of forced sexual relations in the colony: “Husbands and wives are separated, old men are given to comely young women, and young men to old women, according as Harris directs.”

For his part, Harris characterized Chevaillier’s campaign as “simply the revenge of a scorned, detested, and infuriated female.” However, later that year, he left town — first to England, then Wales, and then Manhattan, where — despite claiming he’d discovered the secret to eternal life — he died.

As Unholy Sensations shows, the scandal of the Brotherhood of the New Life presages “cancellation” campaigns of modern times. Instead of Twitter and Facebook, it was carried out in newspapers and broadsheets. Harris’ antagonists, driven by the ulterior motives of what we now call “going viral,” could easily have exaggerated or fabricated out of thin air their stories about rudimentary abortions and forced intergenerational sex at Fountaingrove.

Chevallier’s allegations, reprinted in newspapers nationwide, became the subject of vast speculation, yet any actual details of the colony’s sexual exploits remain unverified today. Paddison notes, plainly and responsibly, that with a lack of evidentiary documentation and the distance of 150 years, no one will ever know the full truth.

It’s this sort of careful, research-based contextualizing that helps make Unholy Sensations a very worthy addition to the small-but-growing library of books about the Brotherhood of the New Life, including The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove, by Gaye LeBaron and Bart Casey, and Thomas Lake Harris and His Occult Teaching by W.P. Swainson.

Aside from a street named for Harris and a park named for Nagasawa, no trace of Fountaingrove’s past remains in Santa Rosa today. The abandoned Fountaingrove winery, a hangout for delinquent teens and curious photographers, was torn down in 2015. Two years later, wildfires destroyed the majestic Fountaingrove Round Barn, originally built by Nagasawa.

Unholy Sensations, meanwhile, ensures the state’s first cult scandal — and our fascination — will live on.