Some History of the Petrolia Oil Project in Soquel Canyon

Following a presentation given last Wednesday to the Orange County Historical Society on some history of the Olinda Ranch and oil field, a seven-part post on Olinda's predecessor, Petrolia, which was located at the mouth of Soquel Canyon where it meets Carbon Canyon—just behind the Hollydale mobile home park in Olinda Village—has just been finished on The Homestead Blog, published by the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry.

The post goes back to 1865 and the earliest known efforts to prospect for petroleum in the area, including the Cañada de la Brea, or Brea Canyon, which was the original name for what is now Tonner Canyon, extending from where the 57 Freeway is today northeast into the Tres Hermanos Ranch.  The next big push for oil came in the early 1880s when Burdette Chandler, a veteran of oil fields in Canada, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and recently a partner in the Puente oil field a few miles to the west, acquired former public lands at Soquel Canyon and began his efforts at Petrolia.

After a significant amount of money and effort, Petrolia largely faded by the end of the Eighties, but Edward Doheny's discovery of oil just a short distance to the northwest (where the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail is now) brought Olinda into existence.  The post might be of interest to those wanting to know more about the early oil industry in our region and in and around Carbon Canyon specifically.

Check it out with this link.

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

This post, continuing the highlighting of a 1924 map of the Olinda Oil Field and nearby locales, moves to the west and south of the area discussed in the last and takes us into the Orange County and Brea portion of Carbon Canyon.

In this case, there are four individually-listed owners of parcels ranging from the county line out to the La Vida Mineral Springs property.  As stated before, although the map is of a certain date, the reference to property owners is, in many cases, to ownership in prior years.  In other words, the persons here likely were not owners of the holdings shown as of 1924, but, instead, earlier.

Closest to the county line is land shown as owned by Annie Edwardson.  Edwardson and her husband Lars were natives of Norway, she born in March 1846 and he six years earlier, and married about 1868.  The two then migrated to the United States in 1885.  By 1900, the two were living in what later became part of the City of Placentia, but which was denoted in the census of that year and a decade later as Fullerton township.  Lars was a farmer and the couple, who had eight children with six living to adulthood, were residing with three sons and a daughter.  Today, there is an Edwardson Circle near the northeast corner of Kraemer Avenue and Bastanchury Road, where there is a townhouse complex today, which commemorates this family's ranch which was on the site.  In fact, they Edwardsons were virtually neighbors of Charles C. Wagner, who, as noted in the last post, owned a stretch of Carbon Canyon just north of Sleepy Hollow over the county line.  It could well be that Wagner and the Edwardsons purchased their Canyon property at around the same time and for similar reasons: the possibility of oil production looming after the 1897 strike of crude at Olinda.  It is hard to imagine why they and others would buy hilly, rocky Canyon land otherwise.

There were three other owners listed to the west and slightly south of Edwardson and in the general vicinity of what became the La Vida Mineral Springs.  One of these is J. S. Carver and, while there was a New York-born furniture salesman of that name who lived in Orange in the 1900 census and died in that city five years later, it is not known if this is one and the same person.  This Carver might plausibly be seen as  a local who may have saved enough money to buy a small plot of land in the Canyon for potential petroleum prospecting.

Another owner was Charles E. Price, who, as noted in an April 2010 post on this blog, was secretary of the Carbon Canyon Oil Company, a firm formed in 1900 and which owned 160 acres at the junction of Carbon and Soquel canyons near the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates in Olinda Village.  Born in Canada about 1868 and a migrant to the U. S. at age 20, Price resided in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1900, a few doors down from Carbon Canyon Oil Company president William West.  While Carbon Canyon eventually went out of business, Price continued to work with oil companies with West and others and lived until 1951.

Finally, there is Burdette Chandler, whose tenure in the Carbon Canyon and wider area was much earlier than the others noted so far in this series.   Chandler was born in April 1836 in Union, New York, a small town southwest of Syracuse and where his father was a merchant.  Chandler, who married in the late 1850s, went into the dry goods business and lived for a time in a small community called Pomfret, near Lake Erie about halfway between Buffalo and Erie, Pennsylvania.   Meantime, the first oil boom in the U.S. erupted in 1859 in Pennsylvania and Chandler went to Venango County, the center of all the attention and worked as an operator there.  He then migrated to Toronto, Canada by 1871 and was involved in oil speculation there before trying his hand in similar endeavors in West Virginia.

In 1877, Chandler and his wife Albertine came to Los Angeles and resided on Aliso Street near the Los Angeles River, where, in 1880, Chandler was listed in the census as a farmer.  In an article in the Los Angeles Herald from 1906, Chandler tried to take credit for introducing the oil industry to the city.  While there were attempts as early as 1865 and then during the first half of the 1870s to develop wells to the north in present-day Santa Clarita, with some small successes, it is true that Chandler was one of, if not the first, to drill a crude (!) well within the city limits of Los Angeles.  He did have some success and, by his account, "later I bought up thousands of acres of land near Whittier, Puente and Fullerton," including an instance in which, "at a sale of the old Temple estate, I bought 1200 acres of land north of Brea Canyon for $800."  This refers to the former Rancho Cañada de la Brea in Brea Canyon, which had passed to the ownership of rancher and banker, F. P. F. Temple.  The Los Angeles bank owned by Temple and his father-in-law, William Workman, half-owner of the massive Rancho La Puente in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, collapsed in 1876 and Chandler was able to buy up some considerable acreage from the ruined men's estates.

In a depressed economy that lasted for a decade or so, Chandler claimed that he "lost" 1000 acres to Standard Oil Company and sold 200 more to a man named Daniel Murphy and his Brea Cañon Oil Company in Fall 1899.  Chandler also noted that he sold other oil-rich lands, before they were developed, for small amounts, including a section of property in the Puente Hills that he got $1300 for, but stated were worth $2 million in 1906.  In another instance, Chandler sold Whittier property to a Michigan native named Simon Murphy for $11,000, which was said to be worth $1,500,000 at the time the article was written.  This area is now the Murphy Ranch areas of east Whittier.

As to the Olinda area, Chandler had acquired quite a holding, as well, but noted that "Scott and Loftus bought some land and they now [again, 1906] have an output of from 1000-2000 barrels per day."  Chandler refers here to William Loftus of the Graham-Loftus Oil Company, an early entrant at the Olinda field during the late 1890s and to William Benjamin Scott, connected to the Stewart brothers [also veterans of the Pennsylvania oil fields] who founded Union Oil Company, and whose Columbia Oil Company came into Olinda at about the same time as Loftus.  Scott was also one of the tres hermanos, along with Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler [no known relation to Burdette] and former Los Angeles County Sheriff and Puente Oil Company president William R. Rowland in the ranch of that name in upper Tonner Canyon north of Carbon Canyon.  In fact, in Fall 1881, Rowland brought Chandler out to his holdings in the Puente Hills to drill an oil well.  Within four years, the two developed enough successful oil production to create the Puente Oil Company, though Chandler soon sold his interest to Los Angeles businessman William Lacy.  Puente Oil also had land and oil wells in the general Olinda and Brea Canyon area.

Chandler, who also had oil interests at Huasna in San Luis Obispo County in 1899 in conjunction with Puente Oil, was quite involved in the Los Angeles city politics and, within only a couple of years of arriving in town, secured election to the city council as a representative of the Fourth Ward,  He served three terms between 1880 and 1888, the latter being the peak of the massive real estate boom known as the "Boom of the Eighties."   After leaving the council (and overcoming a grand jury indictment on a charge of blackmail in 1889, perhaps connected to his political connections), Chandler moved to the newly-fashionable suburb of Boyle Heights.  After the death of his wife, he remarried in 1902 and remained involved in the oil industry (in 1909, he was again arrested on a charge of embezzlement brought against him by two brothers who owned an oil company of which Chandler was a director--this case was dismissed) until his death at age 76 in February 1914, a decade before the publication of this updated map.  Chandler was buried at Rosedale Cemetery west of downtown Los Angeles.

Next, we move a little further west and south towards Olinda.

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.