A 1924 Map of the Olinda Oil Field and Surrounding Areas, Part Six

This detail shows the heart of the Olinda Oil Field as it was in 1924.  At the upper right is the area covered in the last post, concerning parcels in and to the west of today's Olinda Village subdivision.  To the lower right and bottom of this detail, meanwhile, are sections of land held by the Olinda Land Company, the descendant of the original Olinda Ranch, founded by William Hervey Bailey in the late 1880s.  Bailey's son, William, Jr., still had a controlling interest in the land company and held some of his own area parcels, as noted in the last entry. 

While the Olinda Land Company also had some oil wells, these numbered sites marked by black dots, the big players in the Olinda field were major firms like Shell, General Petroleum, and CCMO (Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil).  The latter, co-founded by Charles Canfield, who was a partner of Olinda's first oil producer, Edward Doheny, when the two struck oil at Los Angeles in the early 1890s, operated on land leased from the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.  This area is now mainly within the Olinda Ranch subdivision and up Santa Fe Drive is the Olinda Oil Museum, which features the still-pumping 1896-97 well drilled by Doheny.  Other oil companies featured in this section included Fullerton and West Coast.

Speaking of the railroad, commonly called the ATSF or Santa Fe, the line coming up from the bottom left and ending in two strands at the bottom of the CCMO parcel is the spur rail line built by that company from its main line between Los Angeles and points east from a station stop in Atwood, a neighborhood in today's Placentia.  The spur was used, naturally, to haul crude oil from the Olinda field to the main railroad line for shipment, although pipelines were also added to directly carry the crude to refineries situated in and around the harbors at San Pedro and Long Beach. 

The dual lines with white space in between them, found at the bottom and bottom left of the image, are plotted roadways for subdivisions.  Those to the lower left of the place name "Olinda" and through which the railroad spur lines pass are likely for the 1880s townsite of Carlton, created out of Olinda Ranch property, but succumbing to the bust that followed the real estate boom of 1886-88.

Finally, the dashed line at the left marks the boundary between the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana to its left (or west) and public lands to the right (or east), which latter were used by ranchers in the Spanish and Mexican eras for common grazing. 

The San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana was granted in 1837 by Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado to Juan Pacifico Ontiveros and spanned nearly 36,000 acres in present Anaheim, Brea, Fullerton and Placentia.  Ontiveros (1795-1877) was a corporal in the Mexican Army, stationed at Mission San Gabriel and was later majordomo or foreman at Mission San Juan Capistrano.  In 1853, Ontiveros sold about two-thirds of the ranch to prominent American merchant and land owner Abel Stearns and then moved to Santa Barbara County, where he had a ranch north of Buellton and south of Santa Maria.  In 1857, Ontiveros sold off some more land to a syndicate of German colonists called the Los Angeles Vineyard Society seeking to establish a winemaking community, which they named Anaheim (Ana from Santa Ana, and heim being "home" in German.)  Ontiveros' sons, Juan Nicolas and Patricio, received shares of land on the ranch, but promptly sold them to their sister's husband, August Langenberger, one of the German founders of Anaheim.  Another German, Daniel Kraemer, acquired the remainder of the ranch at the same time, in the mid-1860s, and this became the foundation of the city of Placentia.

The northern boundary of the rancho extends to Tonner Canyon Road and then to Brea Boulevard before it enters the City of Brea and on out to a short distance east of Harbor Boulevard, before moving southwestward through a small section of La Habra and then southward just to the east of Euclid Street through Fullerton and Anaheim.  At about the intersection of Euclid and Ball Road, the boundary takes a southeasterly angle, passing through the extreme southwest corner of a Disneyland parking area, slicing through the Anaheim Convention Center, and then through a corner of The Block at Orange before turning north and east, passing roughly up near State College Boulevard and the western extremity of Angel Stadium before taking in the west bank of the Santa Ana River until west of Tustin Avenue.  From there, the boundary heads north west of Tustin, which turns into Rose Avenue within Placentia and appears to form the boundary between Placentia and Yorba Linda from north of Yorba Linda Boulevard to Golden Avenue before entering Brea and bisecting Rose Drive until it follows the path of Valencia Avenue until the road turns into the Olinda Alpha Landfill.

Click here to see the September 1855 survey of the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, conducted for the California Land Claims case pertaining to the rancho by George Hansen, who was responsible for selecting the land that became the Anaheim colony shortly after.

More from this map soon.