Forty Acres is best remembered for providing the backdrop for the fictional town of
Mayberry on the television series
The Andy Griffith Show. Many of the street scenes and buildings on the backlot were seen regularly on television screens across America and became quite familiar to viewers. The original Town of Atlanta set, comprising a New York style street, a town square and a residential area to the east, was situated in the center of the property and used on shows like
Adventures of Superman, The town square was also used on
Star Trek in three episodes titled "
Miri", "
Return of the Archons" and "
City on the Edge of Forever", while another area of the lot, the "Arab village", was used in "
Errand of Mercy" and the first pilot, "
The Cage". Sharp-eyed television viewers could note many visual cues that crossed over from one series to the next, including the structures themselves or signs on doors and windows. For example, in ''Star Trek's
"The City on the Edge of Forever", a crossover from The Andy Griffith Show'' can be seen by a sign for "Floyd's Barber Shop". Forty Acres was also the backdrop for an episode of
My Three Sons entitled "The Horseless Saddle" (1961), and five episodes of the TV series
Bonanza where the backlot's Western Street, next to the
Garden of Allah (1936) set, served as a trail town. An added feature was the fact that some portions of the backlot were occupied by
fields and
scrub and provided the ideal conditions for filming a
western. The
Tara set, which sat on a sloping rise at the north western corner of the property, was razed in 1959 to become the
Jerusalem set for
The Greatest Story Ever Told. By 1965 the site was occupied by the
Stalag 13 set for ''
Hogan's Heroes. Most of the sets, which included Camp Henderson on Gomer Pyle, were situated primarily in the center, south and west end of the property. The narrower east end was the site of a western town set at one time, and was later home to an unusual, narrow alley set lined by two long facades facing each other. The alley set was constructed for the Robert Wise film Star! (1968) with Julie Andrews in the lead role, and it also later made a brief appearance in the film Switchblade Sisters'' (1975), as did the streets and buildings of the central town area. Overall, the property was an undulating plateau with a southern slope (by the town square) that led to Ballona Creek. Trees screened the northern and southern perimeter of the property. == List of familiar backlot buildings ==