Tides of Change at Lake Sherwood : Lifestyle: The area was a playground for movie stars before it fell into disrepair. Now it is being transformed by its billionaire owner.

It was 70 years ago when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. went romping through a lakeside forest in southeastern Ventura County, pretending to be an English outlaw in the first of the Robin Hood movies.

With the making of that silent film in 1922, the community called Lake Sherwood was born as a waterfront retreat for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

In its early days, Mary Pickford pretended to accidentally tumble into the lake during the filming of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Later, Joan Fontaine spent some time fishing there.

“I think the biggest thrill was when Maureen O’Sullivan went in the lake with nothing on,” said Norm Suffern, 77, who came to Lake Sherwood in 1934 and is one of the few old-timers still around. “That was a big deal.”

Suffern is one of a handful who remember Lake Sherwood when it was a rustic playground for actors and actresses. About 200 old cottages and lakeside homes remain, some occupied by part-time residents. The lake is now the property of billionaire developer David Murdock, and the surrounding area is rapidly being transformed into more upscale development.

Just west of the lake, hidden behind a hill, Murdock has constructed a new housing development, a country club and an 18-hole championship golf course that attracts rich and famous guests.

The lake that was to become Sherwood was a mountain meadow until 1905, when work was completed on a dam to hold irrigation water for the ranch that eventually became the city of Westlake Village.

In its early days, Lake Sherwood was called Lake Mathiesson and Lake Canterbury, after its previous owners Bill Mathiesson and his ex-wife Elsie Canterbury.

Even after people started calling it Lake Sherwood, it was still known to its owners as Lake Mathiesson and Lake Canterbury. At one point Mathiesson wanted to call it Las Turas Lake.

But people simply didn’t pay any attention to him, and it ended up on the maps as Lake Sherwood.

In the early part of the century, the only way to reach Lake Sherwood was to drive west through the San Fernando Valley on Ventura Boulevard, then take a winding two-lane road that led to Ventura County, said Suffern, who worked as a film technician and editor at studios in Los Angeles.

Back then, waterfront lots were going for $600 to $1,000.

In 1939, when Suffern finished building his one-bedroom house, there were only a dozen bungalows scattered around the lake, and the hamlet had more potholes than residents.

There are stories behind every landmark. A rock on the eastern shore was dubbed Chicken Rock, Suffern said, “because if you get up high enough to jump off it, you get chicken and don’t want to do it.”

Lake Sherwood’s “city hall” and only voting booth were housed at the local fire station. There residents held meetings of the homeowners association and got together for social events.

The lake attracted anglers hoping to snag bass, crappie and catfish. It also attracted East Coast visitors like Jack Speirs.

Speirs visited the lake in 1941 and eventually moved there to work as manager for the Canterbury family, overseeing maintenance of the lake and its picnic grounds for seven years.

Long before he became a writer for Walt Disney, Speirs saw Hollywood actors turning up at Sherwood’s fishing haunts.

“Gary Cooper used to come up to the park and study his lines,” said Speirs, the lake’s unofficial historian.

Some homes in the older, established, southern part of the area were built from old movie sets, Speirs said. He pointed out homes on Lower Lake and Hereford roads that were built from lumber Hollywood left behind.

“The studios used the best lumber,” he said. “It was just cheaper to let somebody else dismantle the set and keep it.”

The 156-acre lake also attracted speedboating enthusiasts because it was one of the largest inland bodies of water around.

“Back then we didn’t have Castaic or Cachuma,” Suffern said, referring to reservoirs in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties. “Lakes were very few.”

Local landmarks, like Maid Marian Park, Stafford and Hereford roads and an estate dubbed Thistleberry Manor by its owner, bear signs referring to the old-English theme and to the home of a merry band of bandits.

Not everything is medieval in tone. The northern shore, where houses were the most expensive, was dubbed the Gold Coast by longtime residents.

In 1983, a legal dispute erupted between lakeside residents and the lake’s owner, Dayton Realty Co. Dayton decided to drain the lake dry. By 1984, “it looked like a trash heap. It was dead,” Speirs said.

Photographs taken of the lake in 1984 show ramshackle docks resting on weed-covered banks. And the lake has never been the same.

Carl Price, a Los Angeles County firefighter who has lived at the lake since 1975, said water activities used to be at the center of most families’ weekends. But today, few residents take their boats out on the lake, he said.

Some never rebuilt their docks. And on any given weekend, the lake appears abandoned.

“When the lake was drained, it took the spirit of the community with it,” Price said.

In 1985, Murdock bought the dry lake bed from Dayton Realty and refilled it. But the arrival of the new development drew mixed feelings.

Barbara Raker, a Lake Sherwood resident who in 1986 wrote a short history of the area, said the area lost its rural charm when development arrived in the 1980s. The developer was given permission by the county to bulldoze 393 trees to make way for his country club and housing development, she wrote.

By 1989, she concluded, “too much has been destroyed,” even though many of the lake’s old houses remain at the water’s edge.

Murdock also built a large wrought-iron gate on Stafford Road, the main avenue leading to the older houses on the southern shore and to the new country club and golf course.

Murdock’s crest, a pair of rearing stallions, was emblazoned on it.

“Before, the only thing that prevented people from going there were the potholes in the road,” said Lloyd Wood, a county fire captain who worked at the Lake Sherwood station between 1979 and 1988. “Now they’ve got guards there, and you’ve got to know somebody to get in.”

But not everybody is sad about the changes that have come to the area around the lake. Bob Liberman, 22-year resident and president of the Lake Sherwood Community Assn., said Murdock’s work has improved, not ruined, the lake’s atmosphere.

“People may like the idea of a rough-and-ready overgrown place, but I don’t think people are unhappy about the additional security,” he said. “You see the same old rustic things. The trees are the same. The roads are the same.

“And the lake has improved.”