Carpinteria: Named for the Workshop That Was Already There

When Gaspar de Portolá's Spanish expedition made camp near this spot in August of seventeen sixty-nine, they found Chumash villagers at the settlement of Mishopshnow in the middle of a construction project. The craftsmen were building a tomol, using natural asphalt from the tar seeps at the beach as caulking compound. The soldiers, recognizing the activity as boat-building, named the site La Carpintería: the carpenter's shop.

The name stuck. The town that grew here still carries it.

The asphaltum those Chumash builders were working with came from seeps that are still visible a short walk south, at the state beach. Those same seeps were later mined commercially and the tar was used to pave some of the first roads in Santa Barbara County. The material that sealed the oldest watercraft technology on this coast was also the material that paved the roads that replaced the Chumash world.

Portolá's soldiers thought they were observing woodworking. What they were actually watching was the maintenance of a technology that had allowed the Chumash to occupy the Channel Islands and the mainland coast as a connected territory for millennia. The Spanish named the place for what they recognized, which was one small part of what they were seeing. The Chumash had a different name for this village and a different understanding of what was being built. That understanding, and the guild that held it, would survive only another sixty-five years.