The Pinschower Home

It may seem trite to begin by saying that Simon Pinschower was an immigrant to our nation who attained the American Dream, but this home is testament to his tenacity, drive, and gumption. He was a simple Polish man, son of farmers back in the Old Country, who wanted the grandest home in his small town, Cloverdale, and he built his dry goods emporium brick by brick and dollar by dollar until he could afford to build the original house, with its first tower bedroom, for himself and his wife, Marian. That home is pictured above, as it stood in 1901, with the Pinschowers standing proudly before it.

If Sawyer Wilson has learned anything from his parents, it is to honor, respect and pay homage to the history of the properties they steward, and to work to pass that history on through unparalleled access to important pieces of Northern Sonoma County history. Just as Ken and Diane carefully restored and maintain the barn at Wilson Winery or the distillery at Jaxon Keys, Sawyer and Alison are trying to evoke the hob-knobbing heyday and relaxed grandeur of Simon Pinschower’s home in the early days of Cloverdale proper, when Luther Burbank would come for dinner or Brainerd Jones would consult (and complete) the building of additional tower rooms as Pinschower’s buying power increased.

Beyond the earthly goods of Simon Pinschower, The Pinschower Inn hopes to bring awareness to some of Cloverdale’s quirkiest or most intrepid figures from Pinschower’s era. We celebrate the Italian Swiss colony at Asti, where Italians found safe haven plowing the fields and planting the area’s first grapes just as they had learned to do in their homelands. We tip our hats to Cloverdale’s own enigmatic spiritualist figure, Emily Preston, who was rumored to be a divine healer and keeper of great spiritual wisdom. And we hope you might spend a moment thinking about the earnest devotion of the Icaria Speranza utopian community (which were, maybe oddly to our modern-day temperament, very popular in their own time, as those disillusioned with the depersonalization of the modern industrialized world sought to live in symbiosis with their environments and their brethren far from humming machines and industrial wastescapes). We strive to help our guests to not just enjoy a wine tasting and a soft bed for the night. We realize we hold the literal and figurative key to another era, and all the hopes and dream that tie us back to that distant past.