By Karen Rubin, Travel Features Syndicate,goingplacesfarandnear.com
A major highlight for a visit to Sonoma County, California, this year takes place at one of my favorite places: Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen: the celebration of 150thanniversary of novelist Jack London’s birth, with a full year of public programming and special events.
Planned events through 2026 include a quarterly speaker series featuring scholars and London’s great-granddaughter, a “Call of the Wild Day” family celebration with art, music, and guided walks, and gala events. The program also introduces new offerings such as an online “Around the World on the Jack London Trail” guide and themed trail challenges to highlight London’s global travels and local legacy. This yearlong initiative aims to blend heritage interpretation with immersive experiences in a beautiful, hike-friendly setting at a California state park.
I am lucky to visit the state park on Jack London’s actual birthday (admission free that day!) and visit the cottage he lived in while he and his wife, Charmian, were building their dream home, Wolf House. (Wolf House tragically burned down just before they would have moved in, but you can visit the spectacular ruins.)
The cottage – amazingly modest for such a successful writer – is filled with original furnishings and artifacts and photos – you even see the fireproof safe where he stored his manuscripts. The cottage gives you such an intimate window into the man – you see a large office, but it is the tiny porch room with a simple cot where he slept and worked – and get a peek at his personality and idiosyncrasies (like how he liked to play practical jokes on his guests, who slept in a separate building).
The Cottage was the Londons’ principal home on theBeauty Ranch, which he eventually expanded to 1400 acres through acquisitions and used to experiment with sustainable farming techniques.
London purchased the wood-framed Cottage, built in the 1860s, in 1911, along with the Kohler and Frohling Winery buildings where he housed workers and guests. They lived in the cottage while building the Wolf House, but enlarged it after the Wolf House burned in 1913 until it included some 3000 square feet of living space. Here in the cottage, he wrote many of his later stories and novels; a disciplined writer, he produced 1000 words a day, while Charmian edited, typed manuscripts and letters in the expansive office.
You actually have to go out of the cottage to an adjacent building that served as the kitchen and their dining room, where you see the piano that London bought as a gift to woo Charmian.
As the docent notes, these two buildings capture Jack and Charmian’s bohemian lifestyle and their unique working relationship. (You can visit the cottage noon-4 pm.)
After touring the cottage, I take one of the many hiking trails through a redwood forest – this one to the small “lake” Jack London used for fishing.
Source: LI Press
