By the seaside

My understanding is that when the property was purchased in the '20s for the purpose of building a reservoir surrounded by a lakeside community, the developers added the "o" to the spelling to distinguish it from Malibu, only a few miles to the south. Both were adapted from a term in Chumash, the nation of which extended over a good deal of California coastal regions. The "o" spelling is the only one I've ever seen on maps.

As a former resident of the area and all around film maven, you might also know that Lake Sherwood, where Michael Curtiz shot so much of The Adventures of Robin Hood, is a few miles to the west.
 

It's at this point I must issue some self-correction. Prying open a rusted file cabinet of memory, I pulled the wrong Robin Hood folder. Although Curtiz did employ the area, it was for the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks production that the most extensive use of the location was made. It was, in fact, from that association that it acquired the name remaining to this day (even though the dam forming it had been built in 1904...I wonder what it was called in the intervening years). 

Ah! Here we go: in 1896, W. H. Matthiessen acquired a roughly 8500-acre portion of the Potrero Valley, building Alturas Dam and creating the reservoir alternately known as Potrero Lake and Lake Matthiessen. Another tidbit: the acreage changed hands a few more times and, by the time Curtiz shot there in the fall of '37, it was owned by none other than William Randolph Hearst.

I love California history...and on days like today, the internet.
 

Rarely metioned .. worth seeing !!!