Fern Cottage Historic District

Two-and-a-half miles west of Ferndale, in coastal northern California, a 160-acre farmstead preserves the working landscape of a 19th-century cattle family. At its center is Fern Cottage, a one-and-a-half story wood-frame farmhouse built in 1866 on land patented to Joseph Russ. Plans were drawn by George Fairfield, unusual for early Humboldt County farmhouses. Additions made in 1878, 1892 and 1897 repeated the original gabled design, with clapboard siding, brick chimneys and modillioned eaves, to house a growing family. Inside, rooms remain much as they were in the 19th century or the 1920s, including a kitchen still heated by its wood-burning range. Barns, sheds, gardens, orchards, a poultry house and a woodshed show how the farm fed and supplied the household. Russ rose from a landless immigrant to one of the county's wealthiest cattlemen, and the family's preserved letters record local settlement history. The district is valued as an intact example of a self-sustaining settlement-era farm.