An Inland Town on the Edge of an Ocean

How did merchants from a small town buried in northern forests — thousands of kilometers from any sea — end up founding a fort in California?

Totma sits on the Sukhona River. The nearest ocean is several days' travel away. No fleet, no port. And yet, in the eighteenth century, this was the place dozens of men set out from to reach Alaska and the Pacific coast of North America. Historians count around twenty Totma-led expeditions into Siberia and Russian America. That's not chance — that's a system.

And at the base of that system was salt.

For centuries, Totma made its living from salt — and not the ordinary way. According to museum records, this is where Russia first developed deep drilling: brine was pumped up from great depths through wooden pipes. More than that — the country's first written manual on this kind of drilling was written here. A craftsman named Semyon Sablin put it together, under a plain, workmanlike title that translates roughly as "Instructions for Starting New Pipes in a New Location." A seventeenth-century engineering document, out of a small northern town.

Salt money flowed into merchant households. Merchant households funded expeditions. Expeditions headed east.

The best-known name Totma sent out into the wider world is Ivan Kuskov. He was born here in 1765, into a modest trading-class family — not wealth, not privilege. One source states plainly that part of what drove him toward Russian America was the need to pay off serious debts. Not the romance of exploration — hard-nosed merchant economics.

But whatever pushed him out of Totma, what came next is a different story. Kuskov became an explorer of Alaska and California, and the closest associate of Alexander Baranov, the chief manager of Russian America. In 1811, he founded Fort Ross on the California coast — the first, and the southernmost, Russian settlement on the Pacific coast of North America. By some accounts, the fort went up in under six months.

Worth noting: this was no mere outpost. Fort Ross was an agricultural hub — it grew wheat to feed the Russian settlements up in Alaska, which couldn't feed themselves. Kuskov spent more than ten years in California as the fort's commandant, returned to Totma shortly before his death, and died here in 1823. Today the town runs a house-museum dedicated to Kuskov — though as of the latest information, it's closed for renovation, with a reopening of the updated exhibition planned for December 2025.

Now look at the churches — if you're standing on a Totma street right now, you can see them clearly. Tall, narrow, with façades that don't resemble the baroque style of Moscow or St. Petersburg. This is what's known as Totma baroque.

The defining detail is the cartouche — an ornamental panel or scroll framing the windows and doorways of the churches. In the European tradition, the shape of a cartouche traces back to sea charts: it's the frame old maps used to hold a title or a legend. Is it a coincidence that this decoration turned up in a town of seafarers? Historians think not.

Totma baroque is the only style of its kind anywhere in the Vologda region. The churches were built with merchant money through the mid- and late eighteenth century — exactly when Totma's expeditions were launching one after another. Stone façades were, quite literally, a record of success: routes traveled, wealth earned, ambition made visible. This isn't just religious architecture — it's the town's merchant history, carved into stone.

So what's left of all this today? Salt-making has become a museum re-enactment, a staged show called "How the Old Salt-Makers Worked." A lost industry turned into a tourist draw. Fort Ross survives as a historic park in California. Kuskov is a name on a museum's façade.

A town that never once saw the sea left its mark on two continents — and wrote that mark straight into the stone of its churches.

Ask me about the cartouches on Totma's churches sometime. I know whose name is hidden in one of them — and why the craftsman couldn't sign it openly. But that's a different tour.

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