History
Point Dume was named by George Vancouver in 1793 in honor of Padre Francisco Dumetz of Mission San Buenaventura. The name was misspelled on Vancouver's map as "Dume" and was never corrected. In the early 1980s, real estate development interests began pronouncing the name "du-MAY" and spelling it "Dumé"; this did not catch on.
In the mid-1930s, the 900-ton steam-schooner California, of the California Whaling Company, would anchor in Paradise Cove about a mile offshore, near Point Dume, and process whales caught by her two "killer boats", the Hawk and Port Saunders. She spent about four months there each winter (December–April), mostly flensing gray whales on their annual migration from Alaska to Baja California and back. Emerson Gaze, a reporter who spent a day with the fleet, said they had caught over fifty whales up to late January 1936, nearly all gray (with the exception of a few humpback and sperm whales). Nial O’Malley Keyes, in his book Blubber Ship, reported large numbers of whales were caught within a mile of Malibu (in or before 1934), a reference to the Point Dume operation.
Up until the 1940s, Point Dume was a windblown, treeless bluff covered by native chaparral. Post-WWII the bluff became slowly settled by independent-minded folks, who planted trees and other non-native flora among their single-family homesteads. In 1968, Point Dume Elementary School opened, but closed in 1980. It reopened in 1996 and remains open today, now known as the Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School. By 2007, many of the simple homesteads were torn down to make way for mansions and mega-mansions behind walls, many with expansive ocean views while other large homes were surrounded by mature trees.
Read more about this topic: Point Dume
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)