The history of Guerneville has been marked by a series of economic surges, most of them relatively short-lived.

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John Schubert

An early businessman named John Bagley may have been the most prominent citizen of the town that became Guerneville, but as Schubert relates, Bagley chose to name it for one of his friends and business partners, rather than himself.

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Before the train came out the Russian River from the Santa Rosa plain, some Guerneville area entrepreneurs tried using the river itself as a transportation corridor, but as John Schubert relates, that proved to be a short-lived experiment.

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John Schubert, is a Russian River historian and board member for the Sonoma County Historical Society as well as the Russian River Historical Society. His Guerneville Early Days: A History of the Lower Russian River, covers the history of Guerneville up to 1910.

Schubert's self-published book received the 1999 Campbell Augustus Menefee Scholastic Award.

Fires, earthquakes, economic hard times and more have all taken a toll, at one time or another, on the Russian River town of Guerneville, as John Schubert details in this North Bay Report.

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As logging cleared more and more land along the lower Russian River, some astute local businessmen came up with a plan to maximize their resources, by selling vacation homes in the area.

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A common feature of these vacation homes was a wraparound porch, which John Schubert explains was far more practical when they were built than now.

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