Olinda Oil Field History: Origins of Olinda, Part 2

Actually, this post represents a mild, but notable, diversion from Part One.  When William Hervey Bailey bought the land that he named Olinda Ranch during the great land boom of the late 1880s, he hired a real estate and mining speculator to work with him.  This was George Whitwell Parsons, who remained an agent and secretary of the Olinda Ranch Company through the 1890s.

Parsons was born in Washington, D. C. in August 1850.  He was the only son among four children of Virginia Whitwell, a native of Richmond, Virginia, and Samuel Miller Parsons, who hailed from Wiscasset, Maine.  His mother came from a well-to-do family and she went to Mrs. English's Boarding School at Washington, where she was a classmate of Jessie Benton, daughter of powerful Missouri senator, Thomas Hart Benton, and wife of the famed and controversial explorer and politician, John C. Frémont.  Samuel Parsons, an graduate of the first class at Yale University's law school in 1843, began his practice in Brooklyn, New York (which was an independent city until the 1890s) but met his wife at Washington, where the couple started their family before relocating back to Brooklyn. 

George was educated in public schools in Brooklyn and then attended a seminary at Blairsville, Pennsylvania before going back home to study accounting and bookkeeping at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.  He was working as a clerk at brokerage and import companies while studying law at his father's practice (an apprenticeship known as "reading" with a law firm) on Wall Street, the financial center of New York and the United States.  George, however, soon tired of the law and migrated in 1874 to Miami, Florida, where he sold salvage lumber.

He then headed westward, landing in Los Angeles in August 1876, just after the town of about 15,000 was shaken by financial disaster and heading into a long period of population decline and business depression.  Almost exactly a month after his arrival, the Southern Pacific Railroad line from San Francisco to Los Angeles was completed and, in 1885, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (which had a huge stake in Olinda later on) built its line directly to the nascent city from the east.

Parsons, though, came at a bad time to Los Angeles and quickly headed north to San Francisco where he spent three years working as a bank clerk for the National Gold Bank and Trust Company. Always on the lookout for new opportunities, Parsons found one in a new mining town in the Territory of Arizona called Tombstone, where he migrated with the gloriously-named Milton Clapp.  Readers of the Chronicle may recall that Richard Gird, owner of Rancho Santa Ana del Chino and founder of the town of Chino, was one of the prime movers in the development of Tombstone.  As it turned out, it was 1880 when Gird sold out of his mining interests at Tombstone and bought the Chino ranch and Parsons was heading the other direction, arriving in the boom town in mid-February.

The tract map of the town of Carlton, identified at the upper left as being in "Olinda Ranch."  This 1888 map is provided courtesy of the Orange County Archives.

Parsons was a notable resident of that famous community for about seven years.  For example, as the rough-and-tumble Tombstone grappled with disorder and violence, Parsons was a member of the Committee of Vigilance's administrative wing, the "Council of Ten", seeking to root out lawbreakers in town.  He was a close friend of the famed Wyatt Earp and other major characters in the community.  In 1885, he helped form the library, one of the "civilizing" influences in the town and served as librarian.  More importantly, Parsons kept a diary, which he had started upon his mother's death in 1869, and continued it all through his years in Tombstone, up until mid-January 1887, when, news of the Los Angeles real estate boom reaching his ears, he packed up and headed back to the coast.  As to his diary, it has been one of the most important sources of information about Tombstone, including the Earp brothers, the O.K. Corral incident, and other historic events.

When Parsons reestablished himself at Los Angeles, he moved into the Argyle Hotel and hung his shingle at 41 South Fort Street in a real estate business with partner Maurice Clark.  Soon afterward, the two were hired by William H. Bailey to work on the Olinda Ranch subdivision, including the town of Carlton, which began its operations in early 1888.  Within a year, however, the great "Boom of the Eighties" had gone bust, though Parsons continued in real estate, as well as mining, and also retained his involvement with Olinda Ranch.  In fact, in 1894, when Bailey announced the shuttering of the Los Angeles sales office and the relocation of all company operations to the San Francisco main office, Parsons was company secretary.

Parsons was also an Arizona commissioner of deeds and notary public, but became well-known in Los Angeles as a charter member of the city's Chamber of Commerce, which re-formed in 1888, and was Chairman of the Mines and Mining Committee.  Due largely to his efforts, the Chamber was successful in 1894 in securing a State of California survey of Los Angeles-area oil lands, two years after Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield brought in the first successful oil well within the city.  Doheny went on, in 1896-97, to drill the first oil well at Olinda.

Parsons, whose active involvement at Olinda seems to have ended by 1900, continued to live and work in Los Angeles, dealing in real estate and mining.  He was reunited with Wyatt Earp, when the Tombstone marshal migrated to Los Angeles and when the lawman died in 1929, Parsons was one of the pallbearers.  Unmarried, Parsons died in January 1933, leaving a modest $25,000 estate, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.  A set of scrapbooks covering the years 1893-1920 kept by Parsons was donated to the special collections section of the library at U.C.L.A.

Olinda Oil Field History: The Origins of Olinda, Part 1

Back in the earliest days of this blog, a reference was made to the beginnings of the Olinda oil field (see here) regarding its founding by a W. H. Bailey in 1891. This post offers a correction and a good deal more (interesting?) information about the origins of the community.

Early in 1888, when the Los Angeles region was deep in the throes of a massive land boom known as the "Boom of the Eighties" and real estate speculation was in a frenzy, an advertisement appeared in the Los Angeles Times that was typical in its florid, overheated language praising "The Olinda Ranch" and its "fertile farms" and "beautiful villa sites."

The notice went on to claim that "this land is some of the most fertile in the Santa Ana Valley," which was a little strange because Santa Ana is a good deal south, although the reference could have been to the old Rancho Cajon de Santa Ana, which was historically near the tract. Moreover, it claimed that the property was "highly improved and now producing a great variety of fine fruits, grains, alfalfa, etc."

By improvements, this presumably meant the most important of all, a reliable water supply and the piece went on to claim that there was an "ample supply of water for irrigation and domestic use." Yet, it went on to note that "Hotel and Water Works in course of construction [italics added.]"

In addition, there was mention of "a $50,000 plant to develop the immense deposits of Asphaltum and Oil on the north line of this ranch," a direct reference to the fact that asphaltum was so common in the area that the name of a ranch, "Cañon de la Brea," embracing Brea Canyon, was a reference to the tar that residents in the area during the Spanish and Mexican eras used to coat their house roofs (the tar pits on Rancho La Brea, now part of the La Brea Tar Pits at the George Page Museum, were the source for Los Angeles residences.) It also followed by three years the discovery of oil nearby in what is now Rowland Heights on the north side of the Puente Hills within the portion of Rancho La Puente owned by former sheriff William R. Rowland.

Moreover, the ad stated that "the Anaheim, Olinda & Pomona R.R., now building, gives direct communication with Los Angeles and the sea." This project was evidently projected to go through Brea Canyon to connect the established towns of Anaheim and Pomona.

An advertisement filled with hyperbole and rampant over-enthusiastic observations
about the newly-subdivided Olinda Ranch, Los Angeles Times, 24 January 1888.

The parcel was said to contain a "fine view of sea and mountains and the neighboring towns of Santa Ana, Anaheim, Orange and Long Beach [the latter was hardly neighboring, though]."

Most importantly, however, was the fact that "the finest portion of this ranch" was "surrounding the Rousing Town of Carlton." This townsite, "situated in the midst of the ranch" was said to be "rapidly taking its place as an important town, and is preparing for electric lights, newspaper, bank and business buildings." Not only that, but its unnamed "principal boulevard is to be paved throughout with asphaltum, making a handsome drive through the town and ranch."

Carlton was located at what is now the area east of Rose Drive and north of Imperial Highway. Even today, 123 years later, some of its streets survive, including the east-west thoroughfares of Wabash Avenue, Chestnut Street, Chicago Avenue, Walnut Street, Brooklyn Avenue, Pacific Avenue (though east of Valley View or the old First Street and, therefore, outside the actual Carlton boundary), and Los Angeles Street (while Orange Street is now Marda Avenue and Richfield Avenue is today's Bastanchury Road.) Of the numbered north-south lanes, First is now Valley View Avenue, Fifth is now Prospect, Seventh is today's Rose Drive and Eighth and Ninth seem lost to history. But Second through Fourth and a sliver of Sixth streets are all still around. At the southeast end of the old townsite, there is even a small little lane called Carlton Place. Most of the site is now situated within the City of Yorba Linda, although some of the western portion is in Placentia, where pieces of Brooklyn and Chicago avenues extend west of Rose Drive and flank Golden Avenue, which might be the western extension of Walnut Street.

To top off the hyperboles, the ad claimed that "three-fourths ofthe town of Carlton was sold in 30 days, and prices have advanced 400 per cent. This acreage will rise in the same proportion, though its opening prices were promoted at a mere "$100 per acre upward" in lots of one to twenty acres.

The piece concluded by offering daily excursions to "fertile Olinda" with trains leaving at 9:30 a.m. and returning at 3:15 p.m. (presumably offering a free lunch in the bargain.) Interested parties were requested to inquire at the Los Angeles office of the company with its agents, Maurice Clark and George W. Parsons.

For a time, this ad and slight variations of it appeared in the Times, but the problem was that the real estate boom was filled with myriad other examples of Olindas and Carltons and the speculation was so rampant that the inevitable bust came by the end of the year.

Still, despite the failure of the real estate market and the collapse of Carlton and the Olinda Ranch subdivision, its owner, W.H. Bailey pressed on. Next, more on him.