Windsor, California

The community here in northern Sonoma County got its name from a Pony Express rider who passed through in eighteen fifty-five. He thought the rolling hills looked like the grounds around Windsor Castle in England, and the name stuck. For the next hundred and thirty years Windsor remained unincorporated farm and ranch land, known for its orchards and later for its proximity to the wine country vineyards spreading through the Russian River Valley.

Then came a housing boom. Through the nineteen eighties, subdivisions spread rapidly across former orchard land as people priced out of San Francisco looked north. By nineteen ninety-two the population had grown large enough that residents voted to incorporate, and Windsor became an official California town on July first of that year.

It is one of the youngest incorporated municipalities in Sonoma County, a place that went from a rider's offhand remark to a town of more than twenty-six thousand in the span of a century and a half.