The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Spur Line to Olinda

As has been detailed in this blog previously, the discovery of oil by Edward Doheny in the late 1890s in partnership with the railroad giant, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, on what became known as the Olinda field, inaugurated the oil industry in Orange County.

In 1896, just before Doheny's first Olinda well came in, he signed a five-year agreement with the Santa Fe, through its subsidiary the Southern California Railway Company, which completed a line from the east through Santa Ana Canyon and to Los Angeles in 1887, to provide the railroad fuel from his oil endeavors, including that in Olinda, which was usually known as the Fullerton Oil Field.  Light crude oil, such as that extracted from Olinda, proved to be a new way to fuel locomotives, and, just as importantly, it could do so without refining.  Consequently, when producing wells started to come in after 1897, efforts to ship the crude were quickly engaged in. 

The July 17, 1898 issue of the Los Angeles Times, for example, reported on new wells put down on the Olinda Ranch and that, "if expectations are realized, plans made for an extensive pipe-line system will be put in effect at once."  This line was to "extend from the ranch to Richfield station on the Santa Fe, which will be the shipping point" to Los Angeles and, strangely, south to Los Alamitos, "where, it is said, the sugar factory will be supplied with oil for fuel," a contract with the sugar firm having been nearly completed.  Richfield, by the way, was an area now in the city of Placentia named by the Richfield Oil Company, later Atlantic Richfield or ARCO, and which became a major oil producing area a little later than Olinda.

This mention of sugar, in fact, has an interesting sidelight, as the expansion of sugar beet farming, introduced in southern California by Richard Gird, owner of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, the western boundary of which was just slightly east of Sleepy Hollow within Carbon Canyon, and developer of the town of Chino.  Gird enticed the Oxnard brothers to come out from the midwest to work at Chino before they went on their own in Ventura County, where the city that bears their name is today.  Meantime, sugar beet production also developed in other regional locales, such as southeastern Los Angeles County, including at Hynes, now Paramount, and southwestern Orange County, including the aforementioned Los Alamitos, where Montana copper mining magnate William Andrews Clark opened, in 1897, his factory, which continued to operate until 1926.

Returning to Olinda, the Times reported on 13 August 1898, that the Santa Fe's chief engineer Fred T. Perris, for whom the city in Riverside County is named, and chief clerk F. B. Henderson from the railroad's Santa Ana office, visited Olinda to check on the progress of the wells in which the company had its interests.

By August 1899, the paper sent a reporter out to Olinda to describe the scene.  This person stated that "the Santa Fe group of wells . . . are named from the fact that the Santa Fe Railroad Company controls the major part of them, E. L. Doheny being a partner in their ownership."  With respect to what was done with the crude once it was extracted, the reporter stated that, "the entire output is hauled to Richfield Station, four miles distant, where the company takes it for fuel for their locomotives."  The piece went on to note that Santa Fe had ten operating wells and four more were drilling.  Also noted was the fact that there were several competitors, including Columbia Oil Company, Graham-Loftus Company, Charles Victor Hall, Easton-Eldridge and Company [who were involved also in Chino, as noted in this blog elsewhere], and the Olinda Oil Company. 

In its 8 November 1899 issue, the Times reported that

The Southern California Railway Company has petitioned the Board of Supervisors of this county [Orange] for a right-of-way across certain public highways running from Richfield in a northerly direction—a distance of about four and one-half miles.  It is the intention of the railroad ro construct a branch from the Santa Ana Cañon to the location of the company's oil wells in the vicinity of Olinda.

It might be of interest to observe here that during the famed boom of the late 1880s that spawned William H. Bailey's Olinda Ranch and the failed townsite of Carlton nearby,  there was also a proposed railroad, that never got past the idea stage, called the Anaheim, Olinda and Pomona Railway, that would have gone from the first-named city to the last through, presumably Brea Canyon or, perhaps, Tonner Canyon.



This 1920s map detail shows the spur rail line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway coming up through the failed townsite of Carlton, passing the Pacific Electric Railroad interurban line moving from La Habra off to the left down to Yorba Linda at center right and then turning slightly before entering the Olinda Oil Field where Carbon Canyon Dam and Carbon Canyon Regional Park are now located.  The short spur to the right led to the tank car  loading area and the one to the left went to the depot and freight facility.  From a map in the collection of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry, California.  Click on the map to see an enlarged view in a separate window.

As detailed in an information-packed article by Dennis White (with assistance from Bryan Hunnell and Donald Cole) in the Hot Rail! Newsletter's Fall 2004 issue, the 4.2 mile spur line ran up a grade from Richfield to Olinda, where several spur tracks branched out from the main spur (this is shown in the image provided here from an early map.)

White explinaed that, "at Olinda, a 10x20 wooden depot with platform was ready for business when the line opened, but the volume of freight required an expansion to 20 x 20 within the first year.  The first freight agent at Olinda was Mr. F. S. Weber."

He also pointed out that, while the elevation change seemed minor, going from about 250 feet above sea level at Richfield, which was renamed Atwood in 1920, to 440 at Olinda, the terrain was somewhat rugged and the grade not insignificant.

In early 1906, the Santa Fe decided to retire the Southern California Railway Company and the line through northern Orange County and the Olinda spur were officially known as Santa Fe ones.  White's article included some interesting technical information concerning the operation of the line, especially at the crossing with the Pacific Electric Railway Company's interurban line that came from La Habra to Yorba Linda and ran from 1911 to 1938 (portions of the old PE line are now a multi-use trail in Yorba Linda, while the portion in Brea exists as a right-of-way with the tracks removed in recent years.)

This detail from a ca. 1920s Auto Club of Southern California road map also shows the Santa Fe spur line, noted as A.T. & S.F. R. R., just east of Rose Avenue (now Rose Drive), but note that the spur and Rose Avenue went together into Olinda through what is now Carbon Canyon Dam and Carbon Canyon Regional Park.  The entirety of the spur is also shown from the main line of the Santa Fe at Atwood in Placentia to its Olinda terminus.  From a map in the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum collection.  Click on the map to see an enlarged view in a separate window.

As noted by White, the Olinda field began to decline in the 1940s, so the Santa Fe shuttered its spur line in 1945 as piplines replaced rail service for the shipment of oil (recall above that a pipeline had been discussed in 1898.)  Then, the construction of the Carobn Canyon Dam in the late 1950s and early 1960s took place on some of the old spur line and some of the rail material remaining was used as fill for the dam.  In 1975, Carbon Canyon Regional Park opened on the canyon (or north) side of the dam and further park development altered the landscape where the line once ran.

The path of the rail spur south of the dam also disappeared over time as suburban development took hold in the post-World War II years.  As noted by White, the wye at Atwood that marked the junction of the spur and the mainline was gone by the late 1980s.

Still, White identified in his piece seven areas where the track once ran using modern GPS coordinates, streets, and other landmarks.  For example, he noted that the Olinda spur and the PR line met between Prospect and Rose Drive at Imperial Highway, the PE running along the south side of that latter thoroughfare.  He even specifies a Mobil Oil pipeline sign, stating that the pipeline ran just to the east, but parallel to the spur.  From Imperial, the sput moved northwest for a half mile or so before turning north toward the center of Carbon Canyon Dam.

Finally, he observed that the Olinda depot and freight dock were located at where the East Gate ranger office for the regional park sits and that the tank car loading area was a half-mile east and south of Carbon Canyon Road.

Notably, directly across from the newer entrance to the regional park, installed several years ago, is a signalized main artery, intersecting with Carbon Canyon Road, in the Olinda Ranch subdivision called Santa Fe Drive.  Take that road north from Carbon Canyon and take a right turn after curving to the west and you come to the Olinda Oil Museum and the still-operating well #1 drilled by Edward Doheny in 1897.

Much has changed and the physical evidence of the Santa Fe's Olinda spur rail line are all but disappeared, but there are still some tangible pieces of the history that made Olinda a famed place name for its oil industry for decades.

Olinda Oil Field History: Origins of Olinda, Part 8

As the Olinda oil field grew in importance in the waning years of the 19th-century, Olinda Ranch founder William Hervey Bailey continued to work to improve his position within the field.  Having already sold or leased large portions of the ranch he established a decade prior during the fabled Boom of the Eighties, Bailey formed the Olinda Oil Company and the Richfield Oil Company.

In early October 1899, however, he moved to expand his reach, as announced by the Los Angeles Times in an article on the 3rd, which announced that "there seems no longer to be any doubt as to the important position Orange county [sic] is to occupy in the development of oil on this Coast."  Referring to important sales of oil land in the area, the paper offered that "yet the general public has but little conception of the real extent to which the development of this industry is destined to go."  In truth, the paper had little idea either, given the oil production had not seen the advent, in any major way, of the emerging automobile industry and the Wright brothers and their airplane were still a few years off.

Interestingly, the Times indicated that, while oil was found in Olinda only within the previous few years, "it was believed to be in very small quantities—scarcely enough top justify development."  After, however, "several men with capital were attracted to this locality," lands deemed only usable for sheep grazing became highly prized for the petroleum potential.

This led to the news that "today four deeds were filed here transferring over eight thousand acres of oil land to the Consolidated Olinda Oil Company, the aggregate consideration being $340,000."  The paper went on to state that "this land was formerly owned by W. S. Bailey, Jr.," though they certainly meant William H. Bailey, Sr., not his 26-year old son.  The next sentence has a little syntax and grammar problem: "The Olinda Oil Company, the Richfield Oil Company, and the Olinda Ranch Company, the Consolidated Olinda Oil Company, has secured control of the oil interests of the other companies above mentioned."  What this seems to mean is that the new consolidated firm absorbed all the interest in the former Olinda Ranch of the ranch company, as well as those of the Olinda and Richfield entities.  The article closed by noting that "this company will make extensive developments in the oil district in this county during the next few months."

Just two days later, though, the Times reported "that the big oil deal a few days ago, by which the Consolidated Olinda Oil Company became the owner of more than 8000 acres of oil-bearing land in this county, and for which they paid $340,000, was made in the interest of the Union Oil Company."  In addition, a Union Oil representative appeared before the Board of Supervisors in Santa Ana "to present a petition for permission to pay an oil pipe line from the oil wells back of Fullerton along certain county roads to the Alamitos beet-sugar factory."  Moreover, it was observed that Union first proposed securing a right-of-way to Newport Beach, but "that the use of the wharf at Newport could not be procured."  Further, the company intended to build the line from Los Alamitos (near where the San Gabriel River empties into the Pacific at the border of Seal Beach and Long Beach [and, therefore, at the junction of Orange and Los Angeles counties]) and over to the harbor at San Pedro, recently the subject of massive federal appropriations for creating a man-made port facility that led to the modern day Port of Los Angeles.

The following day, on 6 October, the Times noted that the Consolidated Olinda Oil Company filed its articles of incorporation at Santa Ana and that $500,000 of stock was to be issued, divided into 50,000 shares at a par value of $10 each.  At the time, though, only $1,220 was subscribed among those stockholders who constituted the Board of Directors.  These were William Hervey Bailey and T. V. Bakewell of Oakland, Ralph Jones and a Mr. Donzel of San Francisco and Bailey's brother-in-law, Warren Olney, Jr., also of Oakland.  Notably, Bailey held $1,000 of the initial subscription amount, while Olney and Donzel took $100 and Bakewell and Jones but one share of $10 apiece. 

A little sidenote of interest:  Olney was married to Bailey's sister.  His namesake father was from frontier Iowa and was a teacher (one of his students was the legendary Texas judge, Wyatt Earp) before serving in the Union Army in Missouri during the Civil War.  Warren, Sr. earned a law degree from the University of Michigan and then migrated to San Francisco in 1868.  Although a sucessful attorney and mayor of Oakland from 1903 to 1905, the senior Olney is perhaps best known as a founder with John Muir of the Sierra Club and wrote its first charter, as well as serving as vice-president.  As to Olney, Jr., he also had a distinguished legal career as an attorney and served on the California Supreme Court from 1919 to 1921.  The younger Olney's son, Warren III, continued the family tradition of law and was Assistant Attorney General under President Eisenhower in the 1950s and oversaw the criminal division of the Department of Justice.  More well-known than them all, though, is Warren Olney IV, a longtime news reporter, anchorman, and radio personality in Los Angeles.

Back to Olinda.  Readers of posts on Tonner Canyon will recall that the Union Oil Company, founded in Santa Paula by Pennsylvania veterans of the oil industry like Lyman Stewart, Thomas Bard and Wallace Hardison, will recall that Hardison's sister married William Benjamin Scott, one of the "three brothers" of Tres Hermanos Ranch in upper Tonner Canyon in Diamond Bar/Chino Hills, and founder of the Columbia Oil Company, which had a significant presence in Olinda.  William Hervey Bailey's Consolidated Olinda Oil Company as a front of sorts for Union was further expounded upon by the Times in an editorial on 8 October 1899, when it referred to the recent deal with Consolidated as a transfer "from the Olinda Oil Company to the Union Oil Company."  Because, "the latter is known to have very heavy capital," it was fully expected that Union was going to get its product from the field via pipelines to ports for transfer.  This presaged a great boom for Olinda and, indeed, this was the case.

Yet, it is interesting to note that, on 13 October 1899, the Times reported that Consolidated Olinda filed a lawsuit against Columbia Oil, William Benjamin Scott, Wallace Hardison and others to take possession of 320 acres of land which it claimed it owned and which was said to be oil-bearing, as well as seeking $500 in damages.  The outcome of that case has not been found by this blogger.

Meantime, in early November, the Southern California Railway petitioned Orange County's Board of Supervisors for a right-of-way across public roads because "it is the intention of the railroad to construct a branch from the Santa Ana Cañon to the location of the company's oil wells [the Santa Fe lease] in the vicinity of Olinda."  This spur line will be the subject of a future post and reflected another example of important infrastructure to get crude oil from Olinda to shipping points.  While Union Oil was looking at a lengthy pipeline system to San Pedro Harbor, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe via the Southern California Railway was relying on a shorter, simpler transport by rail.

Another sidenote in the same 8 November 1899 Times column from above:  Burdette Chandler, a principal in the Puente Oil Company operating a few miles west and north of Olinda in modern Rowland Heights, also owned some oil lands in the vicinity of the junction of Tonner and Brea canyons and just consummated a deal to sell 200 acres to the new Brea Cañon Oil Company.

As 1900 dawned, the action was increasing with greater force and speed.  More to come next entry.

Olinda Oil Field History: Origins of Olinda, Part 6

After the first oil well at Olinda was brought into production in April 1897 by Edward Doheny in association with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad's Southern California Railway subsidiary, matters moved rapidly toward the development of the area, which was called the Fullerton field.

In June 1898, the Los Angeles Times did a brief profile on the Olinda Ranch, noting that the 4500-acre parcel was subdivided during the great Boom of the Eighties a decade before "with a townsite in the middle of the tract, named Carlton."  It referenced founder W. H. Bailey and his transfer of the ranch to the Olinda Ranch Company.  Yet, as the paper pointed out, "few sales were made, and most of the townsite has now been transformed into acreage," meaning larger lots of probably the 5, 10 and 40 acre ones promoted for the ranch outside the Carlton townsite.

Of note, however, was the fact that a new entity was entering the field at Olinda (fortunately, the name "Oil Center" proposed in April 1897 went nowhere!)  As reported by the Times, this was the "Richfield Oil Company," which, the paper continued, "has secured extensive rights of development, pipe-line privileges, etc., from the Olinda Ranch Company, and proposed operating not only directly, but by subleasing lands for oil development . . ."  Observing that "the Olinda Ranch lies south and west of the Santa Fe wells," which was not technically the case, as the "Santa Fe wells" were within the original Olinda Ranch property, the paper noted that W. L. Watts of the California Mining Bureau had visited the ranch to assess its oil-bearing potential.  Because of Watts' favorable report, the Richfield Oil Company, later the Atlantic Richfield Company now known as ARCO, was formed to work the field.

Also of interest is the fact that Richfield was then composed of "San Francisco and local capitalists" and that oil men in the Orange County and surrounding areas would have the opportunity to sublease from Richfield.  Readers of this blog's posts about the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino will recall that, during the 1890s, a San Francisco-based real estate firm, Easton, Eldridge and Company, were hired to market and sell sections of that ranch.    When the incorporation papers for the Richfield Oil Company were filed, this was done by Easton, Eldridge and Company, thus providing another tangible link between Olinda and Chino.

On 3 July, the Times reported that the Mining Bureau's Watts as back in the area reviewing oil properties from Puente Hills to Olinda and further east and south along what is now known as the Chino Hills, but then considered part of the Puente chain, to the Santa Ana River.  Watts, however, believed that there was no indication of oil bearing lands anywhere east of Olinda, which has proven to be the case.  As a sidenote, some attention was paid in the article to Watts' investigations in a canyon near the Southern California Railway's Gypsum side track (this, of course, being Gypsum Canyon) and that a favorable indication of coal was located where existing efforts to mine the material had already been made.  Coal Canyon, naturally, is where Watts was conducting his investigation.  In 1900, Watts completed a report, including a series of maps, that were the first comprehensive effort to examine and interpret the oil lands of southern California generally, including the new Olinda segment of the Fullerton field.

As to Richfield Oil Company's efforts, an article in the same paper from two weeks later, noted that "work on the first of a series of wells to be put down on the Olinda ranch commenced this week."  Commenting that oil experts were favorably impressed with the potential at Olinda, the Times reported that "if expectations are realized, plans made for an extensive pipe-line sustem will be put in effect at once."  This system was projected to run "from the ranch to Richfield station on the Santa Fe [Southern California Railway]."  This refers to the station at what became Atwood, along today's Richfield Avenue in Placentia, where the railroad track still runs parallel to Orangethorpe Avenue.  From that point, the article continued, "from Richfield, over an easy route, the line will be run to this city [Los Angeles], coming in at the west-end depot of the Southern Pacific.  From there it will be run to Los Alamitos, where, it is said, the sugar factory will be supplied with oil for fuel," a contract apparently being imminent.  By sugar factory, this was a sugar beet facility like the one Richard Gird established at Chino, though, eventually, sugar beets as a source of sugar dissipated in favor of protected tariffs for production from Louisiana and Hawaii's sugar cane fields.

As to the wells owned by the Santa Fe Railroad, an August 1898 feature in the Times noted that 8000 barrels of crude were extracted and shipped from Olinda by the company in July and that expectations were for a larger proportion in August.  Well #1 continued to be the best producer, at 125 barrels per day, but an unspecified number (probably a few) were also in production.  Of course, Well #1 is still in operation today and is a feature of the Olinda Oil Museum within the Olinda Ranch housing subdivision on the old Santa Fe property.  Another tangential tidbit:  the article referred to two officials from the Santa Fe being at Olinda looking over the situation, one of these men being Chief Engineer for the company, Fred Perris.  He, of course, is the namesake for the Riverside County city of Perris, a station stop on a company-owned line (once on the California Southern Railway) from San Bernardino to San Diego.

More on early Olinda oil fields next time!

Olinda Oil Field History: Origins of Olinda, Part 5

As noted last post, the Olinda Ranch, as established by William Hervey Bailey in the late 1880s, was promoted as an agricultural subdivision and struggled to do so through depression and drought for most of the 1890s.  Fortunes changed dramatically in 1897, however, thanks to the efforts of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and oil man Edward L. Doheny.

Doheny, born in Wisconsin in 1856, became a government surveyor while still in his teens, working in Kansas before leaving the profession to become a mining prospector in South Dakota, New Mexico and Arizona.  While living in Kingston, New Mexico, he met Albert Fall and Charles Canfield, who both figured prominently in Doheny's later exploits.  Doheny and Canfield worked together in mining, but did not experience financial success, so the latter went off on his own to another mining area nearby and made a small fortune.  Canfield then went off to Los Angeles about 1887, the same time that William H. Bailey made his purchase of the land that he named Olinda Ranch.  Although Canfield lost most of this money during the ensuing bust of the real estate boom, Doheny caught up with him in Los Angeles, arriving there in the Spring of 1891.

Hearing about the presence of asphaltum in the area, Doheny used a $400 investment from Canfield to hand-dig a primitive oil well just west of downtown starting in Fall 1892.  Within months, the well proved to be successful, though a small producer, and it inaugurated the Los Angeles Oil Field.  Despite his initial success, however, Doheny struggled to keep himself as a player in the rapidly-emerging and evolving industry, until he formed a partnership with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and its local subsidiary, the Southern California Railway.  This latter had a new line which went into Los Angeles through Santa Ana Canyon, passing through the area on what is now the track that parallels Orangethorpe Avenue through much of northeastern Orange County.

Doheny convinced the Southern California Railway that the emerging regional oil industry would allow the railroad to move to oil-powered engines rather than coal.  Because of the success of the Puente Oil Company, a company founded by William R. Rowland, former sheriff and scion of an early ranching family in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, with William Lacy and Burdette Chandler, which, in 1885, made a discovery of oil on the north side of the Puente Hills in what is now Rowland Heights, Doheny looked to nearby areas as possible sources of oil.  It should also be noted that surface appearances of asphaltum or tar were so common in the general area that the canyon dividing Los Angeles from Orange County on the eastern end of the Chino Hills had been known in the Spanish and Mexican eras as Cañon de la Brea, and a Mexican-era rancho of that name was created there.  Local ranchers used the raw brea to cover the roofs of their adobe brick homes long before any thought of drilling for oil was considered.

Doheny settled on the area in and around the Olinda Ranch and worked to obtain a lease for some 3,000 acres of the ranch from Bailey.  By the end of 1896, a test well was started at the hilly northern end of the ranch.  Readers of earlier posts in this series will recall that, in 1888, when Bailey began promoting the Olinda Ranch, advertisements noted the presence of oil in this area, but it was completely untested.  At least, until Doheny and the Southern California Railway entered the picture.  Working with an executive from the Santa Fe, the SCR's parent company, named Almon Maginnis, Doheny sited the well and began drilling.

At 400 feet, a shallow depth, oil was encountered, but the well was deepened to twice that depth.  Although the pump encountered typical levels of sand in the well, there was such enthusiasm for the potential of a major strike that the Los Angeles Times trumpeted the project before it was fully determined to be a producing well.  Indeed, in its 28 April 1897 edition, the paper announced that there were plans to have oil extracted from Olinda taken eight miles by a pipeline to Fullerton and the Southern California Railway line.  Addtionally, it was noted that timber was already being gathered about 500 feet away from the first well for a second one.

Interestingly, the paper wondered whether or not it was accurate to label this newly-discovered oil field as part of the Puente field, which was not only several miles to the northwest, but was part of a different geological setting.  Ironically, it was decided in short order that the new field should be referred to as the Fullerton field, though it was several miles from that small, emerging town.  The fact that there was a plan to send oil from the new wells to Fullerton seems to have encouraged state mining officials and others to refer to the new field by that name.




This is a ca. 1920s photograph of the Olinda oil field, which, upon the April 1897 announcement of the first well dug by Edward Doheny for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad's Southern California Railway subsidiary, was first called by the inelegant name (even for an oil field) of Oil Center.


Meantime, the Times also pointed out that Union Oil Company, which got its start in Santa Paula in Ventura County, had obtained some nearby property for oil prospecting, while, up in Tonner Canyon, a tract owned by the People's Bank of Pomona was involved in negotiations for sale and development for oil, as well. 

In these early days when the geological formations and the science of examining and identifying these was still in a primitive stage, the paper reported that there was some confusion and uncertainty about the nature of the new field's structure. Lacking familiar means such as examining rocky outcroppings, prospectors would have to deal with the fact that "the whole country is upturned," presumably meaning not uniform as to surface indications.  Doheny's first well was sited close to an area in which brea was seeping to the surface and the second well was placed near another like tar deposit, in the expectation "that the rocks slope downward to the north" and thus indicating a direction where oil would be most likely to pool.

Two days later, on 30 April, another article promoted that new oil discovery, particularly noting that the Southern California Railway had its own source for oil, independent of middlemen, for its newly-emphasized reliance on the product for fueling locomotives.  While the first well was described as at 900 feet and not complete, there were already some 40 to 50 barrels of crude being extracted daily.  The railway, which had a twenty-year lease, was planning its pipeline, which, thanks to the geography of the new field, would allow oil to simply flow down to the company's tracks by gravity.

Interestingly, the paper reminded readers that, because oil prices had skyrocketed a few years before, the SCR had switched its use of fuel from oil to coal, but, now that there was every expectation of an oil bonanza at the new site, it was looking to return to oil.  The Times also noted that, as the orange industry comtinued to blossom (!), the need for more trains to ship the product out of the area was becoming more pronounced.  It also pointed out that, unlike in Los Angeles, where oil promoters had to deal with the lease of many small lots, the discovery of oil in the hinterlands of Olinda Ranch meant that developers could lease or buy larger tracts and not have to deal with the smaller parcels that could bring a host of issues.  Finally, the paper also stated that older maps, from the 1870s or so, indicated that the area consisted of "coal lands" because of the knowledge of existing tar seeps at the surface.  Of course, the adjacent "Carbon Canyon" also was part of that earlier identification of "coal lands" for the Olinda area.

By late May, another feature was issued by the Times, which, on the 25th, stated that the first well was still not done, but the output from the current apparatus was yielding some 50-60 barrels of crude per day.  However, the second well was in the process of being dug and "will probably be producing oil before many days."  There were immediate plans to begin the digging of the third and fourth wells, too.  In discussing the desire of the railroad to move back to oil-fueled engines, the paper reported that the advantages included less smoke, no cinders, and the resulting cleanliness of the cab meant "that the engineers can almost wear their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes without fear of getting soiled."  The work of the locomotive firefighter would also be materially easier with oil than coal, while other workers on the cars would benefit from not having "to shovel coal till your back breaks."

As to the very earliest name of this new oil field, the first Times article of late April was eager to note that "this new metropolis has sprung unheralded upon the world, and probably this is the first time its name has been seen in print."  Even though there wasn't yet a proven well on the property, the paper saw fit to note that "yet the possibilities of the location seem unbounded."  Consequently, it was announced, the new name of the field was Oil Center and the by-line was so indicated.

Fortunately, the very direct, but clunky name of Oil Center did not stick and soon the Olinda appelation came to be accepted, even under the broader field designation of Fullerton!