Barb Gonzalez / For The BulletinAn art class in the Counterculture Art Haus Gallery, in Sebastopol's Barlow district, inspires artists to employ their own mediums in depicting a model's style. The former warehouse neighborhood is attracting many young entrepreneurs to open studios and restaurants.

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Take a drive through the streets of Santa Rosa, in the heart of California’s Sonoma County wine region, and you may lay your eyes upon more celebrities than you had expected to see.

At the local airport, you’ll probably see Snoopy, straight out of the “Peanuts” cartoon strip, standing with his Sopwith Camel, displaying a medal for shooting down the Red Baron. In Historic Railroad Square, you may be greeted by Charlie Brown himself, wearing a conductor’s cap and taking tickets. You’ll find Lucy awaiting patients outside the Kaiser Medical Center, sitting beneath a sign that reads, “Pediatric Help 5 Cents.”

This is part of a local promotion called “Peanuts on Parade.” In all, more than 80 statues of leading “Peanuts” characters, each of them 4 feet high, stand in or near the city limits of Santa Rosa. Why? This was the longtime home of Charles Schulz, the strip’s creator.

During a 42-year career in the environs of this Northern California city, Schulz earned a reputation as the quintessential cartoonist. He seemed destined for his career from infancy, when an uncle nicknamed him “Sparky” after an early comic-strip character. Friends called him by that name through his entire life.

Schulz launched “Peanuts” (he had wanted “Little Folks”) in 1950 in Minnesota, where he was born and raised. He settled in California in 1958. His strip became so popular, it was published in 2,600 newspapers, 21 languages and 75 countries. And it quickly grew beyond broadsheets; besides books and a plethora of merchandise, the strip inspired several animated television specials, including the first, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” in 1965.

Four months after Schulz’s death at age 77 in 2000, ground was broken on a museum to honor his legacy. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened in August 2002, adjacent to the Redwood Empire Ice Arena — also known as “Snoopy’s Home Ice” — which Schulz had built in 1969 as a place for his children to play ice hockey, a game that he had grown up with in the Midwest.

Schulz Museum

Today the Schulz Museum is a magnet for “Peanuts” fans from all over the world — more than half a million annually.

It’s easy to spend hours in the cartoonist’s studio (relocated from his nearby home), to peruse a historical perspective on his life and to view some of the 17,897 original strips drawn by Schulz.

His widow, Jean Schulz, now president of the museum’s board of directors, “wanted people to see his original strips rather than (having them) in a closet somewhere,” said marketing director Gina Huntsinger. “Sparky did all his own drawing and lettering.”

Plans for the museum began taking shape in 1997 after the Schulzes saw a mural by artist Yoshiteru Otani at a Snoopy Town theme park in Japan. Schulz “was blown away by what he had done,” Huntsinger said. So Otani was asked to do two original pieces that now anchor the museum’s Great Hall.

One of them is a 22-foot-high mural composed of 3,588 black-and-white “Peanuts” strips, depicting Lucy holding a football for Charlie Brown to kick, as she did so many times. (As any “Peanuts” fan knows, she yanked it and Charlie fell on his behind.) The other is a 3.5-ton wood sculpture that illustrates changes in the way Snoopy was drawn through the years.

Over the half-century that Schulz drew the strip, he introduced more than 60 individual characters. Only a handful of them are universally known — Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Pigpen, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty and, of course, Woodstock (Snoopy’s bird friend).

“He (Schulz) was all the characters,” Huntsinger said. “Charlie Brown was the one he related to the most, but all the characters had a piece of him.”

In addition to the permanent displays, the museum has a series of rotating exhibits. Currently, these include “Starry Starry Night,” in which the young characters consider the mysteries of the universe, and “Heart Break,” focusing on the unrequited love of Charlie Brown for the Little Red-Haired Girl, for one example. Spring-summer shows will include “Evolution of the Comic Strip,” tracking the evolution of “Peanuts” before computerization, and “Social Commentary,” featuring Schulz’s subtle statements on everything from politics to race relations.

The “Peanuts” legacy continues beyond the museum. An animated, 3-D feature film is scheduled for release on Nov. 25, 2015, the 65th anniversary of the first “Peanuts” comic strip and the 50th anniversary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” A Twentieth Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios production, it features a script by Craig and Bryan Schulz, the artist’s son and grandson, and Cornelius Uliano.

Craig Schulz is also the president of Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, which operates Snoopy’s Home Ice. A very short walk from the museum, the arena’s facilities include the Warm Puppy Cafe (serving sandwiches and snacks) and Snoopy’s Gallery & Gift Shop.

Urban sights

Schulz was not the only nationally known figure who lived in Santa Rosa. Another was botanist Luther Burbank (1849-1926), a resident for 50 years after moving from Massachusetts for California’s year-round growing climate. “I firmly believe from what I have seen that (Santa Rosa) is the chosen spot of all this earth as far as nature is concerned,” he wrote.

Burbank’s fame was the result of his work in creating 800 new hybrid varieties of plants, especially fruits, vegetables, grains and flowers, through cross-pollination and grafting. Among them were various peaches and nectarines, the plumcot, the Santa Rosa plum, the Shasta daisy, the spineless cactus and the namesake Russet Burbank potato.

Today the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens is a city park and a National Historic Landmark. Open year-round without charge, the one-acre gardens contain examples of dozens of unique plants, from walnut trees to medicinal herbs, ornamental grasses to white blackberries. Burbank’s grave rests beside a greenhouse that he designed and built in 1889. Guided tours of his Greek Revival-style house (built in 1884) are available in summer; Burbank’s widow, Elizabeth, lived there until her death in 1977.

Santa Rosa was also the hometown of Robert Ripley (1890-1949), creator of the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” cartoon and broadcast series that evolved into a set of novelty museums. The Church of One Tree, built entirely from the wood of a single redwood tree, once held the Ripley Memorial Museum; today it is a community meeting space on the north side of Juilliard Park in downtown Santa Rosa.

Clearly, although Santa Rosa is in the heart of California wine country, it is much more than a wine town. In fact, its 170,000 citizens make it the largest California city north of San Francisco and west of Sacramento.

Once a Cahuilla Indian settlement, it was homesteaded in the 1830s as the Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa; established as a formal community in the 1850s, and incorporated in 1868. The San Francisco earthquakes of 1906 and 1969 did significant damage to the downtown area, but a handful of turn-of-the-20th-century buildings survive in Historic Railroad Square.

The old Northwestern Pacific Railroad station, a survivor of the 1906 quake and now the home of the Santa Rosa visitor center, is at the heart of Railroad Square. Opposite is the 1907 Hotel La Rose, its restoration work acclaimed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The 1894 Del Monte Cannery building is now the Sixth Street Playhouse. A few blocks away, Old Courthouse Square has an equal share of restaurants and bars, shops and theaters.

Both neighborhoods are located just off U.S. Highway 101, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Horizon Air, whose schedule includes direct flights from Portland, serves the nearby Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport.

Out of Africa

A few miles from central Santa Rosa, I found several other worthy attractions.

My favorite was Safari West, a fully accredited private zoo with about 900 animals of more than 80 species, most of them African. Started in 1993 by Peter Lang, the son of former Hollywood producer Otto Lang, this game park takes small groups by open-air safari vehicle through its 400 savannah-like acres, where they’ll see everything from giraffes to zebras, cape buffalo to rhinoceroses, and a dozen species of antelope.

“We are here to promote conservation through education,” said Travis Murray, who has been guiding tours here since 2006.

A stroll through a lofty aviary was partially guided by a sociable demoiselle crane named Kovu, who led us to encounters with scarlet ibises, purple gallinules, South African hamerkops and Lady Amherst pheasants. We visited a cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal, and a nocturnal fennec fox, the smallest natural member of the dog family. (Unlike a Chihuahua, it was not bred to its diminutive size.) We met scholarly-looking De Brazza’s monkeys from equatorial jungles, long-haired colobus monkeys from East African forests and nomadic patas monkeys from sub-Saharan grasslands.

One thing that sets Safari West apart from most zoos, and makes a visitor’s experience more like a safari camp in Africa, is its lodging. The park has 30 luxury tent cabins for “glamping” — that’s short for “glamour camping” — so that visitors may close their eyes to the sounds of another continent. Rates range from $200 to $335 double occupancy, depending upon the season and the day of the week, although most cabins sleep at least four.

Drivers who continue over the hill toward the Napa Valley, on the road to Calistoga, will soon find themselves at California’s Petrified Forest, a privately owned reserve. Three million years ago, ash from a volcanic eruption felled and buried a grove of giant redwoods. Trails today wind among the trees-turned-to-stone, some of them with diameters as great as 6 feet.

Of all the wineries in the immediate area of Santa Rosa, my favorite is Paradise Ridge — not only for its outstanding cabernets, zinfandels and chardonnays. The 156-acre Byck family estate, planted in 1978 and producing wines since 1991, affords a fine panoramic view across the upper Sonoma region, accented by an impressive sculpture garden and a unique history.

The sculptures — 44 of them, some temporary, some permanent — are spread across meadows, hillsides and within a wild grove of live oak. David Best’s “Temple of Remembrance II,” a smaller version of a sculpture he created for the Burning Man festival in 2013, and Robert Ellison’s “Four Times Daily,” a might-be musical instrument on a barren bluff where an outdoor concert series is being plotted, are particularly memorable.

Paradise Ridge traces its roots back to the 1870s, when a young Japanese immigrant, Kanaye Nagasawa, began tending newly planted vineyards for the 2,000-acre utopian estate of Thomas Lake Harris, a charismatic religious leader. An intriguing exhibit within the winery tells the story in detail.

Side trips

It would be easy to spend a week or more in the greater Santa Rosa area and not visit the same places twice. The city is a short drive from the Healdsburg and Russian River wine regions, as well as the fabled Napa Valley. It’s close enough to Bodega Bay to smell the Pacific salt air that washes that town’s shores, and it’s a near neighbor to Jack London State Historic Park in tiny Glen Ellen and to Armstrong Redwoods State Park outside of Guerneville.

We had time only for brief stops in the towns of Sonoma and Sebastopol — the first for history, the second for art.

The charming little town of Sonoma, 22 miles south of Santa Rosa, will forever be known as the home of the Bear Flag Revolt. On June 14, 1846, a few dozen American settlers overtook the Mexican presidio, declared an independent Republic of California and raised a banner over the town plaza that today remains the state’s flag — even though the independent “republic” itself was annexed by the United States 25 days later.

Monuments in the northeast corner of the park-like plaza today recall the events. Sonoma’s century-old city hall occupies the heart of the four-square-block plaza, now a national historic landmark. Adjacent are the six individual sites that comprise Sonoma State Historic Park, including Mission San Francisco Solano, northernmost of the state’s 21 Franciscan missions; the old presidio and barracks; and the home of General Mariano Vallejo, a wealthy landowner and important friend to the revolutionists.

When Charles Schulz moved to California in 1958, his first home and studio were in Sebastopol, 7 miles west of Santa Rosa. (He relocated to Santa Rosa in 1969.) The quiet little town today is enjoying a revival as a center for the arts in a former warehouse district known as The Barlow.

Today, galleries and studios, boutiques and salons share space with artisan wine and spirit makers, farm-to-fork restaurants and coffee houses. In his Tibetan Gallery & Studio, master artist Tashi Dhargyal uses hand-ground mineral pigments to paint a giant thangka, or traditional scroll, which will take four years to complete. In the Counterculture Art Haus Gallery, aspiring artists gather once a week to paint a model with their oils, acrylics, pastels or watercolors. At Zazu Kitchen + Farm, diners gather around a central island to nibble a snout-to-tail sampler of the latest delivery from the local Black Big Meat Co.

You won’t find Snoopy or Woodstock here, but you will find plenty of whimsical creations from local artists Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent, who use recycled materials to fashion some strange but recognizable animals. (He sculpts, she paints). Several are in the Barlow; more unforgettable, in a field east of town, is a giant Holstein cow that somehow is a lure for others of its would-be species.

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com