Thomas Lake Harris, who had founded the Brotherhood 15 years earlier, was a former minister, a poet and visionary who preferred to call himself a ‘theo-socialist.’ He had gathered 100 or more followers at his community in Brocton, N.Y., where his disciples had engaged in winemaking as well as dairying and other agricultural pursuits. He had been ‘called’ to Santa Rosa because it was a winemaking region.
… Kanaya Nagasawa, who had been with Harris for several years at his New York community … was among the very first Japanese ever to arrive in this country. He was, at 22, already a historic figure in his homeland, being one of a group of students who were smuggled out of the country to England 10 years earlier.
— LeBaron, Gaye. “Fountaingrove's Strange History Reads Like Fiction.” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 18, 1993.