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.

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.