1924 Map of Olinda Oil Field and Surrounding Areas, Part Five

Our series based on this nearly 90-year old map continues with the ownership (in 1924 or well before) of parcels in and around Olinda Village.  A large section, in fact, between there and the La Vida Mineral Springs property to the east is attributed to a "J.T. Raddick," but nothing has been discovered about this person thus far.  There are, however, three others, who owned property in the mid-1920s or earlier, who can be discussed.

One, actually, has been covered previously--this being William Hervey Bailey, Jr., the namesake son of the founder of Olinda Ranch.  Bailey, Jr. succeeded to the ownership and management of the ranch after his father's death in 1910, and his land in this section appears to have been near the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates tract and the confluence of Carbon and Soquel canyons.  His story has been amply detailed in earlier posts about the Baileys and the history of Olinda Ranch.  We will also see that Bailey, Jr. controlled other parcels on this map lying further south and west in the Olinda oil field.

To the north and west of Olinda Village, in what is today both privately-held land and portions of Chino Hills State Park, there was a notable character in the history of American oil development, John Martin Clapp.  Clapp's holdings extended to the Orange/Los Angeles counties border and, to the east, near the existing water tanks above the east side of Olinda Village, while, to the west, his land seems to have gone close to what is now the Olinda Alpha Landfill.  Given his history, there seems no question that Clapp bought his property, as did many others within the Canyon from about 1900 onward, for potential oil development, though little, if any, was found in his section.

Clapp was born in May 1835 in Mercer, Pennsylvania, in the far western part of the state, not far east of Youngstown, Ohio.  His mother was Sally Hubbard and his father, Ralph, was an iron master (an owner of an iron foundry--steel and ironworking being a primary Pennsylvania occupation for much of its history) before switching gears (!) completely and becoming a Methodist Episcopal clergyman.  The Clapps later moved to a new town established by Ralph called President, in Venango County, to the northeast of Mercer.  It was in nearby Titusville, in 1859, that the American oil industry began.

Meantime, John Clapp worked in the iron industry, perhaps taking over his father's foundry, as his occupation in the 1860 census was that of a "furnace manager."  Two years later, as the Civil War was in full swing, Clapp enlisted in the 121st Pennsylvania Infantry and was captain of its F Company.  Later in life, he was very active in veterans' affairs and was a major figure in the state's Grand Army of the Republic organization.  At the conclusion of the war, Clapp married Anna Pearson from nearby New Castle.  In the 1870 census, the young couple resided with her parents and John worked as a merchant in a flour mill.

His career in that line soon ended, however, as he moved to Tidioute, a booming oil town, in 1871 and engaged in petroleum prospecting with a brother.  Within a decade, he rose rapidly to become one of the state's oil barons and controlled tens of thousands of acres of oil-bearing lands and drilled, along with his brother and other partners, some 250 wells.  By 1881, he moved his family, including three children, to Washington, D. C., while he continued his oil business, supplemented with activities in banking, timber and real estate.  He remained a full time resident of America's capital and had a summer home at Lakewood, New York on Lake Chautauqua, not far from the Pennsylvania border, where Clapp died in October 1906 at age 71.  Interestingly, he was one of America's first major numismatics or coin collectors and his collection, left to his namesake son, was well-known and highly valued.

How Clapp came to acquire property in and around Carbon Canyon takes us back to Burdette Chandler, who was from the same area of Pennsylvania as Clapp and who entered the oil business there in 1860 at the start of the industry, discussed in the last post.  Chandler and Clapp certainly were acquaintances or friends back East and the former, it will be recalled, acquired considerable holdings within the Canyon in the later part of the 1800s, but wound up selling much of it, probably as the Boom of the 1880s petered out and Chandler needed cash.  In a 1906 Los Angeles newspaper article he wrote about the oil industry, Chandler noted that, "Victor Hall [Charles Victor Hall, another Olinda notable earlier profiled in this blog], J. M. Clapp of Pennsylvania and others also bought land.  J. M. Clapp came to my rescue when the Los Angeles business men hesitated and I sold him land at from $2.50 to $3 an acre."  Clapp appears to have owned at least a full section, or 640 acres, of land, at least by the reckoning of this map.

The other individual listed in the map as a property holder in the Olinda Village area was E. F. Gaines, who had the distinction of being one of the few, maybe the only, such landholder who actually lived in the Canyon and, also, utilized his property for something other than oil investments. 

Edward F. Gaines was a California native, born in January 1868 in Gilroy, south of San Jose, and long considered (at least, self-proclaimed) to be the garlic capital of the world.  His father, John, a native of Kentucky, was a carpenter and his mother Mary Margaret Clamp was from New York.  In the 1870s, however, the Gaines family migrated south and lived in the Wilmington area near today's Long Beach, where the family took up farming.  On Christmas Eve 1889, Edward married Frances Atwater, a native of Illinois, and the two settled in the Clearwater community of the Downey Township--now the City of Paramount--where Edward farmed, while the family grew to include three daughters, two of whom lived into adulthood.  As of 1910, the Gaines family still lived in this area, but sometime in the following decade moved out to Carbon Canyon, when Edward acquired property there.

In the 1920 and 1930 censuses, Edward and his wife Fannie lived alone on a ranch with his occupation listed as "farmer" and "dry farmer," respectively.  Oral histories of former residents of the Olinda oil fields (this covered in early posts to this blog) remembered Gaines as running cattle in the hills and it does seem unlikely that there could have been any tillable land in the Olinda Village area.  By 1947, Mrs. Gaines had passed away and nine years later, Edward died in Canyon City, an unincorporated area near Chula Vista close to San Diego.  Still to be discovered is when he sold his land, which was developed into the Olinda Village tract in the early to mid-1960s.

In the same Section 10 as the Gaines and Bailey, Jr. tracts were those of three companies: Olinda Land Company, owned by Bailey; Soquel Canyon Oil Company (previously discussed in this blog), which existed for a few years from 1900; and Continental Oil Company of Los Angeles, founded in 1899, and which was headed by William West, also president of the Carbon Canyon Oil Company, which operated on 160 acres near where Soquel and Carbon canyons meet.  Charles E. Price, owner of land near the La Vida Mineral Springs area, was a partner with West in the Carbon Canyon and Continental firms.  In 1900, Continental had 40 acres in the Olinda field, but its later history needs to be researched, especially as to whether it became part of the Continental Oil Company that is now the massive conglomerate, Conoco (get it?) Phillips.

1924 Map of Olinda Oil Field and Surrounding Areas, Part Three

Two months later  . . . this detail shown here of this map focuses on the area in and around Sleepy Hollow, although the listing of property owners does not necessarily mean that they had possession of those parcels in 1924 and, in fact, most of the land involved had passed on to others.

This post concerns the three privately-held properties, setting aside the corporate Chino Land and Water Company and Chino Real Estate Company, which controlled lots 1 and 35 that straddled the county boundaries of Los Angeles (above the horizontal dotted line moving from center to left and to the left of the angled line moving from the number 35 and to the lower right corner) and San Bernardino and Orange, which are divided by this angled line.  Incidentally, those familiar with the religious compound, St. Joseph's Hill of Hope will know that it sits on the lot 35 property.  Lot 1, meantime, is the area south of Sleepy Hollow heading out into Soquel Canyon in both modern Brea and Chino Hills.

Unfortunately, the property probably most likely to have embraced the area that became Sleepy Hollow was listed as owned by a Charles A. Hall and nothing has been found on this individual.  As to the others, however, there are some interesting north Orange County connections.

First is Charles C. Wagner.  Wagner was born in November 1873 in Elizabeth Lake, a remote area of northern Los Angeles County west of the Palmdale/Lancaster area.  His mother was Josefina Andrada, daughter of 1859 migrants to California from Monterrey, Mexico and there is a place name there today called "Andrade Corners."  Wagner's father was Charles C. Wagner, Senior, born in Wüertemberg, Germany and who lived for many years in Grand Rapids, Michigan before migrating to California during the Gold Rush of 1849.  He may have been the Charles Wagner who briefly held half of the title to a ranch in Sonoma County known as the German Ranch and on which is the noted coastal planned community of Sea Ranch (whose chief developer died within the last few weeks.)

In any case, Charles, Sr. migrated to Los Angeles County, became a sheep rancher and had several children with Josefina Andrada, the eldest of which was Charles, Jr.  Before 1880, the Wagners relocated to what became Placentia and Charles, Sr. maintained his occupation as a sheep rancher and wool grower, owning 150 acres of land near Valencia Avenue and Yorba Linda Boulevard and grazing his animals in Brea Canyon.  Not long after the federal census of 1880 was taken, the 35-year old Charles, Sr. was carrying bricks in a wagon from the Anaheim Landing wharf in what is now Seal Beach, when he evidently feel asleep and fell off the wagon and was killed.

The widow soon married her brother-in-law, John Wagner, shortly afterward and the marriage lasted fifteen years until Josefina's death about 1898.   Meantime, the Wagner family, led by Charles, Jr. moved from sheep raising to agriculture, trying grapes before moving into walnuts and, more importantly, oranges.  In fact, in 1883, the Wagners planted the third orange grove to be developed in what later became Orange County.  Charles spearheaded these efforts and was a founder of the Placential Mutual Orange Association and the Placentia Orange Growers Exchange.  In 1899, Charles married Maud Taylor, a native of Missouri and the two had one son, Merwin, born in 1903.  With all of his success in orange and walnut growing, Charles was able to build a substantial Colonial Revival home in 1920 on the ranch.  He and his wife lived in the house until their deaths in the 1960s, after which their son owned the home for about a decade.  The building passed through a series of owners, including the Calvary Chapel religious organization, but is now the "Wagner House Wedding Center" (see here for the Web site.)  Meantime, the Wagner name also lives on with Charles Wagner Elementary School and Wagner Park, near the house and on the old family ranch.

Why Charles, Jr. acquired the land on the San Bernardino County side of Carbon Canyon is not known, though it is likely that, because the oil boom at Olinda fueled (!) speculation throughout the area, Wagner hoped an investment in the Canyon might yield success in that industry, though no oil of any significance has been found that far north and east of the Olinda field.

This was undoubtedly true for the second property owner covered in this post, Joseph Hiltscher.  That name will be familiar to those who know about Fullerton's Hiltscher Park, a great resource for horse riders and walkers as the park winds through neighborhoods between Euclid Street and Harbor Boulevard south of Bastanchury Road.

Hiltscher was born in Sternburg, Austria in February 1874 to weaver August Hiltscher and Frederika Bochisen.  When he was thirteen, the family migrated to the United States and made their way to Fullerton, where 20 acres was purchased along Orangethorpe Avenue in west Fullerton.  The ranch was planted to apricots, peaches and walnuts under the management of August Hiltscher until his death in 1891.

Meantime, Joseph and a brother went into the meat market business in Fullerton and ran a successful operation for many years.  This enabled Joseph to acquire thirty acres along Romneya Avenue in Anaheim, not far from his family's Fullerton ranch, a little below today's 91 Freeway between Harbor Boulevard and Euclid Street and on which an orange grove was developed.

While the Hiltscher name has long been known in Fullerton, not just for the bucolic park named for them, but also for political activity and a longtime family photography business that was shuttered (!) not long ago, a recent posting by Gustavo Arrellano in the Orange County Weekly's blog (see here) revealed a more controversial side to the family.  In the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence throughout the United States in a time of growing political conservatism, ethnic antagonism, fears of Jewish and Roman Catholic influence and other related issues, the local scene featured its own KKK revival.  For example, in 1924-25, four Klansman, without revealing so publicly, secured election to the Anaheim Board of Trustees [City Council].  A recall election in early 1925 led to the removal of the four (see here for some information on this ignoble part of OC history.)  Meanwhile, Herman Hiltscher, Joseph's brother, was a Fullerton planning commissioner (it was he who secured the naming of the park after his family) and city engineer and Arrellano's post identifies records (though noted as vague) that showed Herman to be a KKK member.

Back to Carbon Canyon  . . . it would appear that Hiltscher's land is actually just north of Sleepy Hollow, embracing oart of the area that is slated for an approved housing development off to the west of Canyon Hills Road and north of Carbon Canyon Road, just above the old Ski Villa site.  Wagner, meantime, looks to have owned only a small part of the Sleepy Hollow community at the end of Francis Drive and much of Grandview Drive at the eastern and southern extremities of the neighborhood with his holdings continuing out to about where Red Apple Lane and the top of the Mountain View Estates tract (subdivided in 1925 along and around Canon Lane south of Carbon Canyon Road) are located.

As to the bulk of Sleepy Hollow, this, evidently excepting the small segment along East Lane (ironically, at the far west end of the neighborhood) which was owned by the Chino Land and Water Company, falls within the land once owned by Charles A. Hall, of whom, as noted above, nothing has been found so far.  It is possible that the name was misslabeled and this could be Charles V. Hall, the Olinda oilman who has been profiled elsewhere in this blog.  This makes some sense, again considering the likelihood that much Carbon Canyon land acquired from the mid-1890s until the mid-1920s would almost certainly have been for speculation in the light of the oil boom at Olinda.  This, however, needs to be confirmed, if possible, by further digging.

Olinda Oil Field History: Origins of Olinda, Part 9

With the end of the nineteenth-century, the hurried activity at the Olinda Oil Field, Orange County's first such center of petroleum prospecting, continued unabated.  For Olinda Ranch founder William Hervey Bailey, this meant further manueverings to protect and maximize his interests.  As noted previously, Bailey created the Olinda Oil Company and then assisted in the organization of the Richfield Oil Company.  But, by late 1899, he engineered the formation of the Consolidated Olinda Oil Company, which appeared to be a front for the powerful Union Oil Company.  Still, the legal issues continued.

In the 22 July 1900 issue of the Los Angeles Times, it was noted that "disputed ownership of territory in the Fullerton [really Olinda] field promises to result within a short  time in the opening of litigation involving the property of nearly every company in the district."  In this instance, this had to do with discrepancies in surveys affecting the boundary of land controlled by two entities: the Fullerton Oil Company and the Fullerton Consolidated Oil Company, the latter controlled by Charles Victor Hall, who was profiled here a while back.

As to Bailey's own consolidated firm, the issue had a short notice that "The Olinda Consolidated is moving a rig to the old Carlton township," indicating an interest in developing its operations further south and perhaps east of its main concentration in the area in and around today's Carbon Canyon Regional Park. 

There was other interesting local news.  For example, the new Soquel Canyon Oil Company (a stock certificate of which was highlighted in this blog some time back), sunk its first well, but found trouble in drilling, so pulled the rig and started a second one nearby.  This company, while working in the area where Soquel and Carbon canyons meet, near Olinda Village and the Hollydale Mobile Home Park, believed it had oil prospects because of successful wells on the same geological "strike" as that of the Columbia and Fullerton companies.  By 1902, however, the Soquel Canyon firm went belly-up as its wells turned up dry.

Meanwhile, further east and south, it was announced that "a large corps of surveyors has been at work on Chino ranch land in Telegraph Cañon . . . good oil conditions exist there."  Telegraph Canyon is the main east-west canyon that runs along the north portion of Chino Hills State Park and some interesting history there will someday be added to this blog. 
A little more than a mohth later, on 31 August 1900, the Times announced further news concerning W. H. Bailey's Olinda activities.  Some 4,400 acres of land was purchased by Bailey and partners for yet another oil firm, the Olinda Crude Oil Company.  This company's capitalization was much higher than Bailey's earlier endeavors, totaling $2 million, and featured a larger pool of investors.  These included prominent Los Angeles businessmen like Abraham Haas, Herman Baruch, H. H. Kerckhoff, M. A. Hamburger, S. H. Mott,  F. W. Braun (men involved in wholesale grocery, furniture, and pharmaceutical enterprises) and Times publisher Harry Chandler.  Its directors also featured banker Herman W. Hellman, lumberman William H. Perry, Braun, Baruch and, of course, Bailey.

Some of the new concern's lands were oil producing under lease to the Columbia and Fullerton companies and 10% of the 4,400 acres were under lease and new wells were being drilled on those, while the remaining company-owned land was to be thoroughly investigated for new wells paid for by the Olinda Crude entity.  By early January 1901, in fact, the Times reported that its first well struck oil at 740 feet.

This was Bailey's last oil company on the ranch he founded in 1887.  His oil-prospecting enterprise seems to have had some success over the years, although it was again reconstituted, using the name Olinda Land Company.  State oil reports in 1918 and 1921 noted that the firm had ten, then eleven, wells and was under the leadership of Bailey's son, William, Jr.  Meantime, in October 1906, remaining land at the Olinda Ranch was sold by Bailey to Jacob Stern, the highly successful German-born Jewish merchant, born in Saxony in 1859, who came to America in 1884 and went first to New York, then Cleveland, where he spent five years in the clothing business.

Stern arrived at Fullerton in 1889 and opened the Stern and Goodman mercantile house on Spadra Avenue, now Harbor Boulevard, building an impressive business building there.  Stern and Goodman had branch stores at Anaheim, Placentia and Olinda and eventually controlled fully 75% of all the hay and grain business in the area.  While Goodman attended to the store, Stern branched out into hay and grain dealing and real estate through a Los Angeles office.  He emerged as a particularly successful and under-recognized real estate investor, having stakes in Yorba Linda (much of the town was founded on his holdings); Placentia; Whittier; Corona; Pomona; Santa Ana; Sunset Beach (just now absorbed into Huntington Beach); one-half of the famed Rancho Cucamonga, which he leased to Charles Victor Hall of Olinda renown; other lands in Los Angeles, Kern, Imperial, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Fresno counties; and, finally, in Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas!  At one time, he owned some 20,000 acres.

In 1918, Stern and Goodman liquidated their store, while keeping the valuable Fullerton building.  Stern also had oil lands in Placentia (the old Richfield townsite) which he leased to General Petroleum Corporation.  After living in Fullerton until 1904, Stern moved to a palatial residence on five acres in what was then a rural outpost west of Los Angeles called Hollywood.  In fact, his property was at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street!  As to his Olinda land, Stern paid $140,000 and planned to subdivide it into fivce, ten and twenty acre tracts.

William Hervey Bailey lived a few years beyond the Stern sale and retained presidency of the Olinda Crude Oil Company until his death at age 64 on New Year's Day 1910 at the Lamanda Park Hospital in Pasadena after a year's battle with pneumonia.  In a Times obituary, it was pointed out that "a little more than twenty years ago . . . he bought a large piece of land in the Fullerton district and organized the towns of Olinda and Richfield.  At that time it was thought the land was most valuable because of the agricultural possibilities, and it was not for many years thereafter that its true worth was discovered through the striking of oil."  Bailey's full-time residence remained in Oakland, but he had a room at the Hotel Melrose in Los Angeles.  After he contracted pneumonia, it was decided to bring him back to Pasadena for the warmer winter climate than what was to be found in the Bay Area.  Bailey was, however, interred with his parents and brother Edward at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

Bailey's son, William, Jr., as noted above, took the reins of the company, which continued to operate some wells as well as receive lease income from other oil firms with producing wells.  It doesn't appear that Olinda Land expanded during the son's tenure, but it maintained its operations, with some occasional indications of new success, such as a 1921 well, its twnety-third, "in an undeveloped section of Olinda and Chino Canyon," this latter seeming to mean either Carbon, Soquel or Telegraph canyon.  But, in early 1938, Olinda Land Company voted to issue a liquidating dividend on its capital stock based upon "the sale of the company's real holdings in Orange county to the Shell Oil Company for $500,000."  Other assets of the firm, basically in marketable securities, were also liquidated and distributed to the company's stockholders.  After just over a half-century, the Bailey family's direct involvement at Olinda was concluded.  Two years later, in July 1940, William H. Bailey, Jr., manager of the Olinda Land Company for almost three decades, died at age 66 at his West Los Angeles home and was buried at nearby Rosedale Cemetery.

With this entry, this series of Olinda Oil Field history comes to a close, although there will be much more to add about the field in later entries focusing of different subjects.