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The National Park Service has done a superb job of restoring the Bishop's House to what it might have looked like in 1850. In one of the main rooms in the Bishop's living quarters there is a picture of a gentleman in a military uniform hanging on the wall above an austere settee. Presumably this is Emperor Nicholas I who was Czar of Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a good year for the Czar, Russia's influence in Europe was at a high point, but within a couple of years things would change and Russia would go down to ignoble defeat in the Crimean War. On the table in front of the settee is a tea service together with a traditional samovar. In the corner of the room is a religious icon. It is not difficult to let one's imagination reconstruct the conversations that members of the Russian-America Company and Bishop Innocent might have had in such a setting at such a time.
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