The Dunites and Moy Mell

In the dunes south of town, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, an unlikely community took root among the sand and the willow, artists, poets, hermits, nudists, mystics, and back to the land dreamers who came to be called the Dunites. Their gathering gained a center when an astrologer named Gavin Arthur arrived. Arthur was a grandson of Chester Alan Arthur, the twenty-first President of the United States, and he organized the scattered bohemians into a loose colony, building cabins in the sand and naming the place Moy Mell, a Gaelic name drawn from Irish legend.

At its height the settlement was small, perhaps a few dozen people. From it came a striking little magazine called the Dune Forum, publishing art, literature, and politics in the early nineteen thirties, though it lasted only seven issues, from nineteen thirty-three into nineteen thirty-four. The Second World War ended the idyll.

and by the early nineteen fifties the Dunites had dwindled to a handful. The dunes had a Hollywood past before the Dunites arrived. In nineteen twenty-three, Cecil B.

DeMille filmed The Ten Commandments here, and when shooting ended the huge Egyptian sets were dismantled and buried in the sand rather than reused. Pieces still surface as the dunes shift, and some are displayed at the Dunes Center in nearby Guadalupe. The Guadalupe Nipomo Dunes became a National Natural Landmark in nineteen seventy-four and a national wildlife refuge in the year two thousand.