Another 1914 Map Showing the Olinda Oil Field

Here is the second map from the Map Folio that accompanied "Petroleum Industry in California, Bulletin 69 from the California State Mining Bureau, which was published in 1914.  As noted in the previous post showing a geological map from the Folio, the report was an attempt by the state to provide the latest information on the development of the oil industry, which was on the cusp of a huge boom that ensued in the late 1910s and the 1920s.

The map in question spans a wide area well beyond the Olinda oil field, but details here focus on the first of Orange County's fields.  The first detail above shows the short-lived 1880s boomtown of Carlton, laid out on the property of the Olinda Land Company, founded by William H. Bailey.

Though Carlton passed qiuckly into oblivion, what came within a decade was Edward Doheny's first oil well at Olinda in 1897, which turned the area into a major oil field, following Doheny's Los Angeles field (in partnership with Charles Canfield) from five years prior.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, through a subsidiary rail line that was built through Santa Ana Canyon and along Orangethorpe Avenue through the Yorba Linda and Placential areas, had a substantial interest in Olinda.  In fact, the above detail shows a spur line built by the rail powerhouse from its mainline to the field, where two separate termini branched off to service the field.  That spur went up what is now Carbon Canyon Dam and the Carbon Canyon Regional Park.  Not surprisingly, when the Olinda Ranch subdivision opened in recent years, the main road leading into the tract across from the park was called Santa Fe Avenue.

Another interesting detail is the Pacific Electric Railway line, an electric interurban transit line which ran down to Yorba Linda from Los Angeles.  Part of the multiuse paved trail that runs from Rose Drive near Bastanchury Lane down through part of Yorba Linda is on the right-of-way of that line.

With respect to the Olinda field, the detail above shows the many dozens of wells in operation as of 1914 as well as those companies that owned or leased property there.  Each numbered dot is a well site, though it cannot be told from the map whether these wells were successful, dry, or still in construction.

In any case, the major players at the time included the Olinda Land Company, General Petroleum Company, Fullerton Oil Company, Columbia Oil Production Company, and West Coast Oil Company.  As can be readily discerned, the lion's share of the wells followed a geological slip strike running from northwest to southeast, mainly from what is above Carbon Canyon Road today in the Olinda Ranch tract and to the west down through the area to the lower right of the image.  There were, however, other wells to the south, some of which are still in operation today, while the vast majority of wells that existed throughout the field are gone and more are disappearing year-to-year.

In the periphery north and east, especially, were a few other firms trying to find adjacent successful wells.  Companies in these tangential areas included the California Crude Oil Company, the Midway View Oil Company, the Continent Oil Company, and the Soquel Canyon Oil Company.  The first two were north of the geologic belt noted above while the latter two were east toward what is now Olinda Village.  None, however, had much success in these outlying sections.

The last detail does show the property of Edward Gaines, who was a longtime cattle rancher east of the field in what became, in the imd-1960s, the Olinda Village subdivision.  Clearly, the areas just east of what is now Carbon Canyon Regional Park did not yield much activity, even though the geologic "hotspot" of what became the La Vida Mineral Springs did generate some interest for oil potential before it was realized that the hot mineral water there could be a commercial venture.  La Vida would basically be located in section 11 of the above map.

There are many other posts on this blog dealing with elements of the history of the Olinda oil field, including specific companies drilling for crude, owners of property in and around the field, and the origins of the name "Olinda."  This map adds another dimension to the developing history of a field that made important contributions to the petroleum industry in Orange County and the Los Angeles metropolitan region broadly.  Almost a century after this map was issued, however, the visible attributes of the field, including the few working wells, are gradually and inexorably fading into history.

The map images come from an original in the collection of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry.

Carbon Canyon Fire History: The 1929 Olinda Blaze

With hot, dry, windy Santa Ana conditions making their usual Fall appearance and the fire threat elevated in our region and, keeping in mind the interesting work done by the local group Hills for Everyone in documenting in map form the fire history of Carbon Canyon, here is the first in a series of posts mining the Los Angeles Times for articles on major fire events in the Canyon.

The earliest found is from 14 November 1929 and Santa Ana conditions were blamed for brush fires in several San Diego County locations with specific mentioned also made about "Shifting Winds Saved Olinda from Flames."

This short article noted that "Five hundred residents of Olinda today were thankful for the vagaries of a shifting wind which late yesterday stopped a sweeping fire that for several hours had threatened the community with destuction."

Showing just how primitive firefighting was eighty plus years ago, the piece went on to note that "More than 1200 men hastily recruited from the oil fields and surrounding communities had found it impossible to stop the blaze."

The conflagration started, it was reported, "on the Ed Gaines ranch in Carbon Canyon," this being the location of Olinda Village today, and it was noted that this was "a slight distance from La Vida Hot [actually, Mineral] Springs, a resort community."  The fire than roared westward for 4 1/2 miles "and was at the back yard of Olinda, when late in the evening the wind swung squarely about, halting its progress."

The blaze was said to have consumed some 5,000 acres "of watershed," which seems to indicate that it burned along the Carbon [Canyon] Creek and, perhaps the Soquel Canyon Creek, area on its way over towards Olinda.  Eight oil derricks, a small house and a powerhouse were destroyed on the leases of General Petroleum (three derricks and the powerhouse), Shell Oil (two derricks), Fullerton Oil (two derricks), and Chanslor-Canfield-Midway, also called CCMO (one derrick.)

In addition, before the wind shifted, "several hundred pumping wells were directly in the path of the blaze" and "also a number of large storage tanks were threatened for several hours."

It is worth noting that just about 80 years later within days of the 1929 blaze, a similar fortuitous circumstance came along in the Freeway Complex Fire.  In mid-November 2008, that conflagration, which laid waste 30,000 acres, had two major origins--just off the 91 Freeway and then heading north through Chino Hills State Park--and an oil field at Olinda near the Olinda-Alpha Landfill.

Sleepy Hollow residents, evacuated for three long nights as the firestorm threatened the community, returned to experience little damage, although a few homes (notably the Manely Friends stable in the Brea side just east of the old La Vida property) were burned to the west.

It was related that a firefighter from the Highland area near San Bernardino told a Sleepy Hollow denizen that he and his crewmates were on the line facing massive walls of flame and were preparing to spray retardant foam on houses and the retreat from the line because there was no way for them to stop the conflagration.

And, then:  the wind shifted.  It moved in a direction away from the houses and the community and headed elsewhere to the east.  Strange how history repeats itself.

Of course, firefighting planning, logistics, equipment and personnel are all far superior now to what they were even two decades ago, much less eight, but the threat of devastating fire is still there and, if the wind shifts the wrong way, all of the preparation and apparatuses in place may not be enough to stop the destruction of fire.

Folks in 1929 were lucky and quite a few in 2008 were, too.

The 1930 Federal Census and Olinda

The increasing affordability of the automobile and the growth of suburbs contributed to a change in the "company town" concept, in which manufacturers had provided housing for workers on the site of the business.  Some local company towns, such as the Simons Brick Company yard in Montebello, as well as the many oil company leases that existed in the region, were affected by the changes in transportation and housing, because workers could live in towns and cities and enjoy the amenities there without having to live at a work site, with the noise, smells and isolation.

This appears to have been the case with the Olinda oil field, as noticeably observed in comparing the 1920 and 1930 federal censuses.  The 1920 enumeration, discussed last entry, counted nearly 1,000 persons within the area from Valencia Avenue east (with a few people on the west in those leases that straddled both sides of the road.  By 1930, however, the entire area designated as the Olinda precinct within the Fullerton township, had less than half the population.

There were 462 persons listed in Olinda in 1930, most, obviously living within oil leases, thought there were 64 persons who were outside of the oil field, in Carbon Canyon and also to the south along Valencia Avenue and Rose Drive.  For the 398 residents of the fields, here is the breakdown by company (CCMO is the Chanslor Canfield Midway Oil Company, successor to the Petroleum Development Company on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad lease):

CCMO:  222
Olinda:  77
West Coast:  56
Shell Oil:  21
General Petroleum:  19
Fullerton Oil:  3

On gender, the percentage of men in the Olinda area was 53% and women 47%.  Adults 21 and over amounted to 57% of the population and those under 21, 43%.  The white population was still overwhelmingly dominant at almost 97%, with 12 Latinos, from two families named Reyes {and likely related) and the same Japanese family, the Fujimotos, residing on the West Coast lease as they had ten years before, although the head of the family was now a "roustabout," or general laborer, and not a boilermaker as before.  Finally, as to home ownership, there was a slight change in home ownership, as 16 of 119 househoulds consisted of families who owned their residence, about 13% of the total.  One residence in particular stood out in terms of its value.  Most owned residences in the oil fields were small, plain wooden dwellings at low value, but on Rose Drive, citrus rancher Michael Harmon, owned a home worth $60,000, a pretty substantial sum at the time.

The same general run of oil field occupations existed in 1930 as a decade previous, including drillers, rotary helpers, rodmen, several types of engineers, machinists, firemen, watchmen, electricians, and others.  A few men held position of authority as superintendents, chief clerks, shop foreman and the like.  Also, where there were several Santa Fe Railroad workers in 1920, there was only a field inspector in 1930, residing on the Olinda lease.  There seemed, however, to have been more variety of jobs held by members of households in which the male head was an oil field worker, including more work done by women.  This seems to be a consequence of the automobile, which allowed oil field residents to find jobs further away from their homes.  What is also notable is that, while in 1920, there were a number of men who lived in bunk houses on a few of the leases, there weren't any who did so ten years later.

On the CCMO lease, there was a barber, dentist, dental assistant,, glass factory worker, nursery bookkeeper, boarding house cook, store clerk, bus driver and real estate salesman.  At West Coast, one wife of an oil worker worked in a beauty shop and there was also an airplane mechanic and citrus workers. On the Olinda lease, there was a garage mechanic and citrus house packers.

There were also oil field-sited jobs that were not directly tied to the business.  Along or near Valencia Avenue, at the CCMO, Fullerton and Shell lease areas were three teachers, presumably at the Olinda School, including Alexander Barnes, a 47-year old from Ohio, Gladys Payton, 31, from Tennessee, and Ethel Overton, 39, born in Illinois.  Overton's husband, Job, also 39 and from Indiana, was the bus driver.  On Valencia Avenue, there was a gas station, run by 67-year old Iowan Omar Waitz.  The CCMO had a company store, whose keeper was George Cullen, a 60-year old Indiana native who was one of the few homeowners in Olinda and he had a manager, 22-year old Clarence Perrin, a native of California.  A teacher, perhaps also in Olinda, lived there, too, Mary Lemke, whose husband had a citrus ranch on the lease property.  There was a bus driver on the lease, too, Walt Cullen (son of the store keeper), but his occupation specifically said "high school," which probably meant that he drove Olinda teens to the only local high school, Fullerton Union.

Of the 64 persons not enumerated directly on oil lease land, a few of them worked in the fields, but there were a few farmers in Carbon Canyon, such as Ramon Reyes, Edward Gaines, who, as in 1920, ran stock where Olinda Village and the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates are located, and Adolph Friend, a West Virginia native in his early 70s who ran cattle in the Canyon, as well.  Down on Valencia Avenue and Rose Drive, there was citrus grower Harmon, another Reyes family, a building contractor, and a moulder for a brass factory.

The 1930 census was taken in April, about seven months after the stock market crash of October 1929 that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.  By 1932, when banks failed en masse, the Depression worsened.  The 1940 census is due to be released this year, so there will be an opportunity soon to examine that enumeration and see what further changes came to Olinda.

The 1920 Federal Census and Olinda

As a companion of sorts to the series of recent posts concerning the 1924 map of the Olinda oil field and surrounding areas, this entry examines the 1920 federal census for the oil field area, specific to the somewhat arbitrary definition this blog takes of Carbon Canyon.  Namely, the discussion here covers the areas mainly east of Valencia Avenue, also the historic dividing line between the Rancho Cajon San Juan de Santa Ana to the west and public lands to the east.  There are a couple of examples, however, where oil lease properties existed on both sides of the subjectively defined boundary--these being the Columbia and General Petroleum leases.

The tallying of twenty-one sheets on the census for the Brea township yields some interesting (and, possibly, useful) information on the nearly 1,000 people who occupied the heart of the Olinda oil field a little over ninety years ago.  The research done deals with gender, age, race and ethnicity, and home ownership and is also broken down into population for the several existing leases.  On this latter point, here's what was revealed:

Graham and Loftus [excluding company lands west of Valencia]:  29 persons
General Petroleum Company: 43 persons
Fullerton Oil Company:  65 persons
Olinda Land and Oil Company: 97 persons
Columbia Oil:  121 persons
Petroleum Development Company: Santa Fe Railroad lease: 275 persons
West Coast Oil:  316 persons

There were also a grand total of 14 persons counted in Carbon Canyon, east of Olinda and up to the San Bernardino County line (a future post will cover that county's portion of the Canyon).

There was an expectation that, because of the male-dominated nature of the oil industry, the gender imbalance would be significant, but, by 1920, there was certainly a difference in who lived in oil field communities compared to in previous years.  Much of this was likely attributable to the availability of the automobile to more working and middle-class families.  So, at Olinda, males amounted to 54% of residents with females, obviously, being 46%. 

With more families residing at Olinda than were likely found earlier, the comparison of adults to children worked out to about 61% of persons above 21 years of age and, of course, 39% under 21.

What was not surprising was the segregated nature of the Olinda community.  Simply put, ethnic and racial minorities were not welcomed at these work sites.  98% of all residents in the Olinda area were American, Canadian or European--94% of them being natives of the United States.  Also to be expected were the large proportion of people who came from oil-producing states in the east, specifically, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas and the like.

There were only 17 persons of Latino or other ethnic groups.  Of these, six were from a Mexican farm laborer family on the Graham-Loftus lease, who were not affiliated with oil production; and five were from a Mexican family that consisted of laborers who worked on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad spur line that came into Olinda from Atwood in Placentia.   In fact, the only people of color who worked on oil properties was a Japanese boilerman on the West Coast lease named Fujimoto (who resided with his wife and two daughters--the children being California natives) and a Hawaiian named Richard Kahalulio, who worked on the Olinda Oil Company property as a teamster.  Kahalulio, however, had a personal connection with Olinda's founder, William Hervey Bailey--he was from the Maui community where the Bailey families were Congregationalist missionaries.

As to residential status, there were about 240 separate households in the covered area.  Of these, only 14 owned their homes with the remainder renting their dwellings, almost certainly, in most cases, from the oil companies.  There were 5 persons whose status was listed as "unknown," though what this might have meant will have to go unexplained.  It should also be pointed out the 50 single men resided in bunkhouses on four different leases (West Coast [17], Petroleum Development/Santa Fe [17], Columbia [9] and Fullerton [7].)  It would seem probable that more single men in bunkhouses would have been found in earlier days.

It was also interesting noting the various listed occupations for oil workers on these leases.  Standard job types would include pumpers, drillers, boilermakers/boilermen, tool dressers, well pullers, machinists, electricians, carpenters, engineers, truck drivers/teamsters, rotary helpers, rodmen, and roustabouts.

Some of these terms needed definition, so here they are.  A roustabout was a general unskilled laborer, doing whatever odd jobs were needed, and were usually more temporary than the skilled employees.  A rotary helper would assist with the use of the rotary drill, a recent innovation in drilling technology.  The tool dresser helped the driller by sharpening the drill bits.  A well puller cleaned and serviced wells and their equipment.  A rodman was a surveyor working on siting potential or chosen well locations.

A couple of men had the intriguing vocation of "gang pusher."  Creative modern thinking aside, these were the guys who supervised the roustabouts and were, basically, foremen for unskilled general labor. 

Above them all, of course, were the field superintendents or foremen, who often had assistants.  In some cases, there were clerks, watchmen [security officers], painters, car loaders, and other field-related workers.  Perhaps the most notable of the first-named was William J. Graham, brother of Smauel C. Graham, founder of the Graham-Loftus Oil Company, one of the oldest at Olinda.  William Graham, a 60-year old veteran of the Pennsylvania oil fields, earliest in America, listed himself as an "oil overseer," meaning, evidently, that was superintending his brother's enterprise at Olinda.  Though not listed on this research, because the fields were further west than the area covered here, was L. A. Hardison, the brother of one of the Union Oil Company's three founders, Wallace Hardison (the others being Lyman Stewart and Thomas Bard.)  Hardison, a 66-year old Maine native, was merely listed as a "laborer."  Samuel Graham's wife, Mamie, was the daughter of Ida Hardison, sister of Wallace and L.A.  There were also a couple of stores on two leases (Santa Fe and West Coast) and a boarding house on the West Coast lease that had a keeper, cook and two waitresses--these being a widow and her son and two daughters.  The Columbia lease also had a boarding house keeper and assistant, both women.

Then, there were those residents whose jobs were outside of the field.  On the Olinda Land and Oil Company lease was the Olinda School and its two teachers were listed as Maud Crane, a 28-year old from Minnesota and Myrtle Harris, 23, from Wyoming.  Also at Olinda was an apiarist, or bee-keeper.  At the Columbia lease, there was a partner in a transfer (trucking) company and his wife, a music teacher.  Their two daughters were an orange house packer (there were a few packing house workers in Olinda) and a house servant.  At the West Coast lease, straddling Valencia Avenue, was a Baptist church, presided over by a minister, Wilfred Kent, who lived at the house of worship with his wife and two children.  There was also a noteworthy listing, the son of a West Coast blacksmith, 23-year old John Woods, was attending law school.  The West Coast also had a worker's son who worked as a bank bookkeeper and two hotel waitresses.

Finally, there were the few folks who resided in Carbon Canyon east of the Olinda oil field settlements.  Two of these have already been discussed in a post related to the 1924 map, these being farmer Edward F. Gaines and his wife, who owned and lived on land encompassed now by the Olinda Village subdivision and the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates on the south side of the village.  There were two others, however, who will be covered in a future post.