Pismu — the Chumash Word for Tar

The name Pismo does not come from English or Spanish. It comes from the Chumash people, who have lived along this coast for many thousands of years, by some estimates at least nine thousand and perhaps far longer. In their language the word pismu meant tar, the dark, sticky asphaltum that seeped naturally from the ground in Price Canyon, just inland from the shore.

The Chumash gathered this tar and put it to daily use. They used it to seal woven baskets, to fix stone points onto wooden shafts, and above all to waterproof the seams of the tomol, the sewn plank canoe that carried them along the coast and across open water to the Channel Islands. A well made tomol was a masterwork, and the tar that kept it dry came from the very ground that would one day carry the town's name.

Spanish and later American newcomers kept the Chumash word, softening it into Pismo. So when you say the name today you are speaking a fragment of one of California's oldest living languages, a word that means, more or less, the dark stuff that rose from the earth. The Chumash did not vanish.

Their descendants remain part of this region, and the tar that named the beach still marks the deep human history layered beneath the boardwalk and the surf.