Purissima was one of the earliest settlements on the San Mateo coast, four miles south of Half Moon Bay. Father Juan Crespí passed the site in 1769 and named the stream San Ivo; the creek was renamed Purisima in 1786, a name meaning purest. The spelling with a double s is a historical misspelling.
The town itself was founded in the early 1850s in farm country. One early settler, Henry Dobbel, came to California around Cape Horn in 1845 and in the 1860s bought 1,000 acres on Purisima Creek, where a farm and a big two-story house with gas lighting and running water employed about 50 men growing wheat, barley and potatoes. Stagecoaches connected it with Half Moon Bay.
Today only remains survive near the junction of Highway 1 and Verde Road, and it may be the county’s only ghost town. Crime writer Ross Macdonald set a 1958 novel, The Doomsters, in a town called Purissima.
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