Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Five

It appears that the earliest oil well drilled on the Chino Hills side of Carbon Canyon took place in 1929 in the vicinity of today's Western Hills Oaks housing tract.  The well, called "Marie #1" was started by the Urmi Oil Company, which incorporated in October that year, though a Los Angeles Times article from late May noted that the firm was preparing to rig up its well, which was a wildcat (in a geologically unproven location) on a lease.  Who owned the land in question, though, was not stated.

The project hadn't progressed very far, however, when a problem ensued.  A Corona Courier article from early August 1929 reported that Urmi Oil filed a complaint in Los Angeles County Superior Court asking for an injunction against five men for "disrupting and damaging" their well.  It was stated in the piece that two of the men, Robert Rankin and Roy Harvey, were "placed in charge of the well without authority" and that damages of $1,000 were done as a result.  There was no explanation of who hired the two men or any other details, but it appears Urmi was in a lull on the project and someone, perhaps the property's owner, went ahead and hired a crew to continue drilling.

A clue to what happened with the project seems to come from a San Bernardino Sun article from April 1931, where it was reported that a San Bernardino County superior court judge issued a ruling concerning "titles of two ranches near Chino, one in Carbon canyon and the other in Soquel canyon." The defendants, who were on the losing end of Judge F.A. Leonard's judgment, were the Urmi Oil Company, General Petroleum Company (a well-known Los Angeles firm that had a project in Soquel Canyon), and George and Anna Marcell, as well as their Marcell Petroleum Company, Ltd.

The transfer of two properties in Carbon and Soquel canyons from George Marcell to John Schuh, as detailed in the San Bernardino Sun, 21 April 1931.  From newspapers.com.

From this article, it looks as if the Marcells were the owners of the two properties and then leased out portions of them to Urmi and General Petroleum.  It may be that the Marcells were the ones who hired the five men, against whom Urmi sought that injunction on the Marie #1, to further work on that well, perhaps because Urmi was lacking funding to continue with that work.  This seems borne out by the fact that later references to the well indicate that it was Marcell who drilled the well.

In another interesting sidelight, the Sun reported in June 1932 that Frank Creasey was arrested on a complaint filed by Urmi Oil Company, which charged that he stole over $7,000 worth of material from the Marie #1 well site.  Creasey answered that he had a signed order from George Marcell "authorizing him to take the oil well equipment from the Marcell company's leased property that was occupied by the Urmi Oil Co. He said Marcell owned the material in question."  Given that there was no further reporting on this incident, it can be assumed that the case was dropped and that Marcell had the legal right to remove the well equipment.

George Marcell, born in 1887, was a native of Brooklyn, New York (it was still an independent city when he was born, but became a borough of New York City when he was a small child) and remained there until his late twenties, working as a fruit company clerk and bank teller.  By the early 1920s, however, George and his family relocated to Los Angeles, settling in Hollywood, where he was a bonds dealer and banker.  Before the decade ended, Marcell became an oil operator, establishing the Marcell Petroleum Company.  The small firm had at lease one other oil project besides that Carbon Canyon well, this being out in the Playa del Rey area on the coast near Los Angeles International Airport (then called Mines Field.)  After losing his property in Carbon and Soquel canyons, Marcell continued in oil, as will be seen below, and also was the Vice-President of the Los Angeles Board of Public Utilities and Transportation in 1937 and resided in Beverly Hills before retiring to Pasadena.  Marcell died in 1978 at age 91.

The main owner of the two ranches became John E. Schuh, who was born in Hotzhausen, Bavaria, Germany in 1883.  Somehow, though, he migrated to Shanghai, China where he worked as a confectionery [cake] baker before taking a ship to San Francisco in 1915 and working in a German-owned bakery in the city before he moved to Palo Alto.  By 1923, Schuh had relocated to Long Beach, where he opened his own bakery in the city's downtown.  By the end of the Twenties, he expanded his business to include a cafe and it looks as if he operated his business there through the 1930s. In the early Forties he worked at the famed Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.  Schuh, who married later in life, lived for a time in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley and for a longer stint in west Los Angeles, when he worked at the Ambassador, but returned to Long Beach for his remaining years and died after 1962.

Schuh owned his ranches for several years before arranging for a lease with the Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation.  In October 1938, the Los Angeles Times reported that the derrick was built and equipment being installed for a test well on the Schuh ranch, which was described as being 448 acres.  The site was said to have been "less than a mile north of a wildcat drilled by Marcell Petroleum nine years ago."  In addition, the article continued, "The Marcell hole was reported to have picked up sands at 1200 and 1600 feet, with oil and gas showings," this evidently providing enough encouragement and incentive to Schuh and Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation to give the area another shot.  Consequently, the new attempt was anticipated to hit commercial product between 1400 and 1600 feet down.

By early November, a date of the 15th had been selected to "spud in" the well, meaning to start actual drilling.  However, there were delays, and in late January 1939, the Times reported that Carbon Canyon Oil Corp. was readying the well, now called "Mills #1", and that the projected depth of hitting oil was now 1600 to 2000 feet.

In early April, the Times noted that John Hokom, whose efforts were detailed on this blog last year, began his work on 167 acres adjoining the lease of Carbon Canyon Oil Corp.  Meantime, the latter company was still trying to get its test well started and another delay pushed back the spudding to the 10th.  Once again, reference to George Marcell's 1929 test was made to show that there was some promise of oil to be located in the Carbon and Soquel canyons area and the paper alluded to the fact that there were four companies planning to drill in the area.

Finally, in early June, the Times noted that Carbon Canyon Oil Corp. finally began its test well drilling, a good eight months after it was supposed to begin work.  The depth was now stated to be 2000 feet.  Meanwhile, Hokom's well was reported to be a half-mile to the south, but twice as deep.

An article from the Santa Ana Register, 24 June 1939, discussing two oil projects on the 448-acre Schuh ranch in Carbon Canyon near where the Western Hills Oaks subdivision is now located.  From newspapers.com.

Then, a 24 June 1939 article in the Santa Ana Register revealed details about the Hokom/Schuh endeavors that the Times did not discuss.  Namely, even though Schuh foreclosed for his 448-acre ranch in the early Thirties against George Marcell and others, it turned out that the owner of the Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation was none other than Marcell.  Moreover, the Hokom well was on the Schuh ranch and the Los Angeles plumbing contractor spent $12,000 to acquire a 2 1/2% royalty interest from Schuh.  The article went on to state that Marcell had drilled a well nearby in 1929 and his newest effort "was started a month ago and a depth of 200 feet reached when [a] decision was reached to drill a deep test."

As was the case with the Urmi/Marcell well, however, John Schuh ran into financial problems quickly after starting his test well.  In December 1939, a foreclosure action was instituted against him by Oil Tool Exchange, Inc. on an October 1937 mortgage for a little over $15,000 payable over two years.  When only $2,500 of the borrowed sum was repaid, Oil Tool Exchange filed its foreclosure action.

Nearly two years later, in November 1941, the Schuhs filed their response and cross-complaint, acknowledging the note and the mortgage, but denying that they ever received the notice of the execution of those documents or that they got the money.

Instead, Schuh claimed that he had made an arrangement in June 1937 with the Louis C. Simmel Organization to extend up to $6,000 as a line of credit from an oil drilling project Simmel was engaged in at Kern County.  Then, Schuh maintained, Oil Tool Exchange made a secret arrangement with Simmel about its appropriating Schuh's debt to Simmel in lieu of monies owed to the company by Simmel and which the company sought to make good on in a September 1937 court filing!  

Further, Schuh argued that he "was in such financial difficulty that in order to protect his entire holdings from threatened involuntary bankruptcy proceedings" brought forth by Oil Tool Exchange, he and his wife agreed to execute the mortgage and note and paid $2,500 towards satisfying the terms.  The Schuhs prayed that the court would not only return the note and mortgage to them, allow the return of the $2,500 and give Oil Tool Exchange nothing, but asked for $15,000 in damages.

Finally, Schuh alleged that two documents involving a transfer of interests in the Kern County property to his wife and a quitclaim involving the property from the Schus' trust to themselves individually were, in the first case, a forgery and, in the second, a misrepresentation of what he thought was a lease, not a deed.  Schuh, however, could not prove the forgery allegation and the court found his argument on the quitclaim unfounded.

The trial court, in hearing the evidence, found that the situation was far more complex than argued by the Schuhs.  For example, the agreement with Simmel was unconditional and unlimited.  Moreover, the Simmels made arrangements to pay the Schuhs a 2 1/2% royalty for whatever was produced by the Kern County oil well and gave them a 20% interest in additional property for future development.

Moreover, it turned out that Oil Tool Exchange, Simmel and Schuh all worked with the same attorney, so that any claim by Schuh of trickery or malfeasance on the part of his partners was not demonstrated to the court, which also ruled that any allegations against the attorney were not relevant as points of law to the case.

After the trial court ruled against Schuh, he filed an appeal, but the appellate court upheld the lower court's determination in 1944, ending the matter.  The convoluted circumstances shown in the case revealing Schuh's financial distress probably explained how he lost his Long Beach bakery and cafe and took a job at the Ambassador Hotel.

The drilling of the Schuh well was clearly beyond his means, which is not an uncommon problem for would-be oil tycoons chasing black gold, especially in unproven areas like the Chino Hills portion of Carbon Canyon.  Its proximity to the mighty Olinda field convinced him, Marcell, Urmi Oil, Shelly Stoody, Homer May and others mentioned in this blog that there might be fortunes to be made, but they proved ultimately elusive.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Four

At the close of the 1930s, an oil well was drilled somewhere in the vicinity of either what is now the Western Hills Oaks subdivision or closer to the Mountain View tract off Canon Lane, south of Carbon Canyon Road.

The project was initiated by the John Hokom Oil and Gas Company, Ltd., a firm created by its namesake, a successful plumbing and hearing contractor born to Swedish emigrants (his father's name had been Hokansson] in the town of Galva in west-central Illinois in 1876.  After 1900, Hokom relocated to Los Angeles and opened his business which proved to be quite successful. 

Hokom was an active member of the state Master Plumbers' Association, an organization to promote professional practices in the rapidly-growing industry and served as its president in 1917.  Two years later, a trade journal noted that Hokom was "one of the most successful master plumbers in Los Angeles Cal." and that "at the present he is employing 25 mechanics; business is good and prospects are very bright for it to remain so."  This was especially true as the 1920s proved to be a significant decade for building in the Los Angeles area.

Hokom was in his early 60s  when he formed the John Hokom Oil and Gasoline Company, Limited, based at the Hollywood office of his plumbing and heating business, though it appears that his well in Carbon Canyon might have been his only project.  On 8 June 1939, Hokom filed his "Notice of Intention to Drill New Well" with the state Division of Oil and Gas on a lease of 40 acres.  It was estimated that gas would be found "at a depth of about 3500 feet" as noted on the form and some specifics were given in terms of the size of the casing, strings and so on.

Work began on 15 June as the hole was spudded.  By 11 July, the well was down to 2941 feet, but with nothing evidently found, it was decided the following day "to abandon hole from 2941' to 1395'."  On the 13th, 750 sacks of cement were poured into the hole and following days consisted of raising the plug and filling the hole with more cement and then it was decided to revise the project.

On the 18th, a supplementary proposal was submitted that called for redrilling at around 1300', because, it was stated, drillers "encountered two fairly good looking oil sands from 1110'-1252' and 1293'-1375' with thin shale partings and wet sands in between."  It was proposed to start back at 1295' and run a 7" string down to the 80 feet of the bottom of the lower sands.

By the 19th, the hole was "drilled out to 1298" at which time water testing was done and the well was pumped with 200 barrels of water and 34 grains of chloride per gallon through to 9 August.  It was reported that the hole "showed gas and colors of oil." 

But, in 17 August a well report was submitted to the Division of Oil and Gas that proposed "to circulate the hole full of heavy mud, pull all 7" casing possible, cap the 13" casing at the surface with a vented, welded cap and abandon the location."

A report of February 1940, noted that nearly a month passed before, instead of abandoning the well, Hokom went back, presumably with state permission, and, on the 14th, "put well to pumping at 1197'."  Fresh water was used and there were "slight showings of heavy oil and gas."  Yet, by 20 September, the drillers "pulled and paid town tubing and rods, abandoned hole from 1235'"  Cement was poured in and a plug placed at 1103' along with a vented plug in the casing, so that the "well [is] standing."  This meant that the well was not yet abandoned.

In May, Hokom submitted a letter to the state's Oil and Gas Supervisor, informing the agency that, concerning the bond obtained as insurance for drilling the well, Hokom wished to inform the bonding company, "that we have no further need of the above bond, as the well above mentioned was abandoned and capped in September 1939."  This was, as noted above, not true, as the well was left standing with plugs at a depth far below the surface.

Nearly eight years later, on 1 April 1948, a "Notice of Intention to Abandon Well" was filed with the Division of Oil and Gas, stating that the well was cemented to 1103' and that the proposed work to date and to "shoot and pull all 7" casing possible, place cemt. plug" to 266 feet and then "cap at surface and abandon."

A 26 April "Special Report to Operations Witnessed" from the state noted that work conducted on 18-19 April was for work that included "that the 7" casing was shot at 836' and was pulled from that depth," that "plugging operations were started by dumping cement in the hole on a wooden plug at 272'," and that "18 sacks of cement was [were] dumped in the hole beginning at 272'."  Once the cement plug was verified at 231', the abandonment was considered complete.

However, in mid-July 1948, a new well history was filed, showing that, on the 13th, "4 sacks of cement was [were] dumped on wood plug hanging at 10' placing of plug."  Consequently, this last action allowed the Oil and Gas Division to send a letter to Hokom's agent, informing him that the abandonment of the well was finally completed, nearly nine years after it was supposed to have been.

John Hokom lived for another seventeen years, dying in Los Angeles at 89 years of age in July 1965.