The Gaines and Brown Families of Carbon Canyon, Part 12: A Trio of Photos at the Olinda Oil Field

Joyce Harrington, a descendant of the family of Edward F. Gaines and Fannie Atwater, who owned by the Flying Cow Ranch where Olinda Village and the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates are today, as well as from the Brown family who lived and worked in the Olinda oil field, generously provided access to hundreds of photos of both families.

This is the twelfth post in the series sharing these photos on the blog and comprises a trio of images of workers at the oil field, which was opened in 1897 after Edward Doheny, who with Charles Canfield brought in the celebrated Los Angeles field west of downtown, developed a partnership with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad to drill for oil on the Olinda Ranch.

This great image shows, from left to right, Andy Lyle, Earl Brown, a man listed only as Kramer, and Foster Norton at an oil well site in Olinda in 1910.

Railroads were in the process of transitioning to petroleum fuels and the Santa Fe had a line running through north Orange County along modern Orangethorpe Avenue, so prospectiing for oil in the hills at the north end of the Olinda Ranch and following geological traces from the Whittier and Puente fields to the west led to success. 

In fact, the first well brought on to production at Olinda is still operating today as part of the Olinda Oil Museum in the midst of the Olinda Ranch subdivision just north of Carbon Canyon Road.  From there, companies flocked to the field to search for black gold.  As noted, there was a substantial population of workers and their families mostly living in company-owned houses throughout the field.  Stores and a fine grammar school were part of the general Olinda community, though as the automobile became more affordable, people began to move to nearby towns away from the noises and smells of the field.

In this snapshot, Earle Brown is doing a little clowning around at the well site.  With such difficult, dirty work, there must obviously have been a lot of humor displayed at Olinda!

There were some people, though, who continued to reside in the field even when most moved away, so that Olinda School continued to operate into the very early 1960s.  Finally, the school closed and a new Olinda Elementary School was built in the Olinda Village subdivison on the former Flying Cow Ranch.  The old school site, near the Carbon Canyon Dam, which was completed in 1961, later became part of Carbon Canyon Regional Park, opened in 1975.

With regard to the oil wells, they've gradually been shut down, disassembled and capped in recent decades, replaced mainly by housing developments, and those that remain will not do so for long.  As noted here recently, a proposal to build a large number of homes on land on both sides of Valencia Avenue north of Rose Drive/Birch Street and both sides of Lambert Road west of Carbon Canyon is in the works.

This is a particularly interesting image of seventeen well-dressed gents with a train and presumably this was the celebration of the arrival of the first train to use the Santa Fe spur line from Atwood to Olinda.  Although there are numbers with the men for identification, there was no list provided.

It won't be too many years from now that the only visual remainder of the oil industry at Olinda, where petroleum prospecting was launched in Orange County over 120 years ago, will be at the oil museum.  Photos like these help preserve that history for those who won't otherwise have a direct visual reference to what transpired at Olinda.

Look soon for the thirteenth part of this series of great images, courtesy of Joyce, from the Brown and Gaines families at Carbon Canyon.