… On Thursday, a Bay Area environmental group announced the latest chapter at the venerable landscape: a $15 million deal to purchase 1,624 acres of redwoods and picturesque coastal meadows adjacent to what is now Fort Ross State Historic Park, expanding the protected lands around the site by 50%. The redwoods property, larger than Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, includes 3.2 miles along Highway 1 that could have been developed into luxury homes. Every year thousands of tourists, schoolchildren and others visit the historic wooden buildings at Fort Ross, and the purchase by the non-profit group Save the Redwoods League from Soper Wheeler timber company guarantees that rural part of the North Bay coast will remain as scenic open space, looking for generations to come much the same as it did 200 years ago.