Carbon Canyon Historical Artifact #64: "Oil Fields Olinda Cal." Looking North from Carbon Canyon Road, ca. 1920

This real photo postcard and another from a series has been sitting on the desk for months, waiting for its chance to be shared and so it is clearly long overdue for a post on the Chronicle after an eternity of inactivity.

The view is of the Olinda oil field taken from above Carbon Canyon Road, of which a sliver is at the bottom left where the flivver is parked, and looking north into the hills where today's Olinda Ranch subdivision is situated.  The field was discovered by oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, who partnered with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (locomotives were transitioning to oil at the time) to bring in the first well, which is still operating at the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail, in 1897.

In addition to the large tank at the center, the wooden derricks, the sheds and pump houses, tanks and other components of the intensive petroleum prospecting taking place at Olinda during what look to be the 1910s, there is also the presence of the tanker cars for the spur line, coming up from Atwood in Placentia, of the Santa Fe (the line through north Orange County was built by the its subsidiary, the Southern California Railway, in the late 1880s).

In addition to the row of cars waiting, presumably, to be filled with crude for its return trip down to the main line, another track is visible next to a pole and behind that large tank in the foreground.  In the distance are the crown of the hills where the Olinda Alpha Landfill is now and which is slated, some day, to be an Orange County regional park, not unlike what is slowly transpiring with the shuttered Puente Hills Landfill not too far away.

The photographer was Edward W. Cochems (1874-1949), a native of Chicago born to German immigrants and whose family came to California in the 1885, living first in what is now San Marcos and then in Escondido in San Diego County and then moving to Santa Ana about 1912.  Cochems was a manager of a Los Angeles tailoring company before he relocated to the Orange County seat in 1915.  By the time, he registered for the draft, in September 1918, during World War I, he'd established his photo studio there and he ran the enterprise for some three decades.

We'll share the second Cochems view of the field, looking from the hills southward, sometime in September, so be sure to be on the lookout for that.