The Church of One Tree

Somewhere in the forests above Guerneville, in the eighteen sixties, loggers dropped a single coast redwood. The tree had stood two hundred seventy-five feet tall and measured eighteen feet across at its base. When they milled it, that one tree produced seventy-eight thousand board feet of lumber.

Someone decided to build a church with it.

The Church of One Tree was completed in eighteen seventy-three, the original home of the First Baptist Church of Santa Rosa, located at the time on B Street in downtown. The entire structure, every board, every beam, every plank of flooring and every rafter, came from that single tree. The building cost three thousand dollars. The lumber alone was the more remarkable fact.

Robert Ripley, who grew up a few blocks away, featured the Church of One Tree in one of his earliest installments of Believe It or Not. His mother had attended services there. It was, for Ripley, not just a local curiosity but an early confirmation of the lesson he would spend his career teaching: the world was not what people assumed it was, and the evidence for that was everywhere if you looked.

The church was eventually moved from its original site to Juilliard Park, where it still stands, to prevent its demolition. In nineteen seventy, decades after Ripley's death, the building was repurposed as the Ripley Memorial Museum, stocked with oddities and Believe It or Not memorabilia. It operated in that capacity for nearly two decades.

After an extensive restoration in the early two thousands and two thousand eleven, the city reopened it as a venue for weddings and special events. The lumber of one redwood, which fell more than a hundred and fifty years ago, is still holding the building up.