Carbon Canyon Historical Artifact #64: "Oil Fields Olinda Cal." Looking North from Carbon Canyon Road, ca. 1920

This real photo postcard and another from a series has been sitting on the desk for months, waiting for its chance to be shared and so it is clearly long overdue for a post on the Chronicle after an eternity of inactivity.

The view is of the Olinda oil field taken from above Carbon Canyon Road, of which a sliver is at the bottom left where the flivver is parked, and looking north into the hills where today's Olinda Ranch subdivision is situated.  The field was discovered by oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, who partnered with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (locomotives were transitioning to oil at the time) to bring in the first well, which is still operating at the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail, in 1897.

In addition to the large tank at the center, the wooden derricks, the sheds and pump houses, tanks and other components of the intensive petroleum prospecting taking place at Olinda during what look to be the 1910s, there is also the presence of the tanker cars for the spur line, coming up from Atwood in Placentia, of the Santa Fe (the line through north Orange County was built by the its subsidiary, the Southern California Railway, in the late 1880s).

In addition to the row of cars waiting, presumably, to be filled with crude for its return trip down to the main line, another track is visible next to a pole and behind that large tank in the foreground.  In the distance are the crown of the hills where the Olinda Alpha Landfill is now and which is slated, some day, to be an Orange County regional park, not unlike what is slowly transpiring with the shuttered Puente Hills Landfill not too far away.

The photographer was Edward W. Cochems (1874-1949), a native of Chicago born to German immigrants and whose family came to California in the 1885, living first in what is now San Marcos and then in Escondido in San Diego County and then moving to Santa Ana about 1912.  Cochems was a manager of a Los Angeles tailoring company before he relocated to the Orange County seat in 1915.  By the time, he registered for the draft, in September 1918, during World War I, he'd established his photo studio there and he ran the enterprise for some three decades.

We'll share the second Cochems view of the field, looking from the hills southward, sometime in September, so be sure to be on the lookout for that.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Five

It appears that the earliest oil well drilled on the Chino Hills side of Carbon Canyon took place in 1929 in the vicinity of today's Western Hills Oaks housing tract.  The well, called "Marie #1" was started by the Urmi Oil Company, which incorporated in October that year, though a Los Angeles Times article from late May noted that the firm was preparing to rig up its well, which was a wildcat (in a geologically unproven location) on a lease.  Who owned the land in question, though, was not stated.

The project hadn't progressed very far, however, when a problem ensued.  A Corona Courier article from early August 1929 reported that Urmi Oil filed a complaint in Los Angeles County Superior Court asking for an injunction against five men for "disrupting and damaging" their well.  It was stated in the piece that two of the men, Robert Rankin and Roy Harvey, were "placed in charge of the well without authority" and that damages of $1,000 were done as a result.  There was no explanation of who hired the two men or any other details, but it appears Urmi was in a lull on the project and someone, perhaps the property's owner, went ahead and hired a crew to continue drilling.

A clue to what happened with the project seems to come from a San Bernardino Sun article from April 1931, where it was reported that a San Bernardino County superior court judge issued a ruling concerning "titles of two ranches near Chino, one in Carbon canyon and the other in Soquel canyon." The defendants, who were on the losing end of Judge F.A. Leonard's judgment, were the Urmi Oil Company, General Petroleum Company (a well-known Los Angeles firm that had a project in Soquel Canyon), and George and Anna Marcell, as well as their Marcell Petroleum Company, Ltd.

The transfer of two properties in Carbon and Soquel canyons from George Marcell to John Schuh, as detailed in the San Bernardino Sun, 21 April 1931.  From newspapers.com.

From this article, it looks as if the Marcells were the owners of the two properties and then leased out portions of them to Urmi and General Petroleum.  It may be that the Marcells were the ones who hired the five men, against whom Urmi sought that injunction on the Marie #1, to further work on that well, perhaps because Urmi was lacking funding to continue with that work.  This seems borne out by the fact that later references to the well indicate that it was Marcell who drilled the well.

In another interesting sidelight, the Sun reported in June 1932 that Frank Creasey was arrested on a complaint filed by Urmi Oil Company, which charged that he stole over $7,000 worth of material from the Marie #1 well site.  Creasey answered that he had a signed order from George Marcell "authorizing him to take the oil well equipment from the Marcell company's leased property that was occupied by the Urmi Oil Co. He said Marcell owned the material in question."  Given that there was no further reporting on this incident, it can be assumed that the case was dropped and that Marcell had the legal right to remove the well equipment.

George Marcell, born in 1887, was a native of Brooklyn, New York (it was still an independent city when he was born, but became a borough of New York City when he was a small child) and remained there until his late twenties, working as a fruit company clerk and bank teller.  By the early 1920s, however, George and his family relocated to Los Angeles, settling in Hollywood, where he was a bonds dealer and banker.  Before the decade ended, Marcell became an oil operator, establishing the Marcell Petroleum Company.  The small firm had at lease one other oil project besides that Carbon Canyon well, this being out in the Playa del Rey area on the coast near Los Angeles International Airport (then called Mines Field.)  After losing his property in Carbon and Soquel canyons, Marcell continued in oil, as will be seen below, and also was the Vice-President of the Los Angeles Board of Public Utilities and Transportation in 1937 and resided in Beverly Hills before retiring to Pasadena.  Marcell died in 1978 at age 91.

The main owner of the two ranches became John E. Schuh, who was born in Hotzhausen, Bavaria, Germany in 1883.  Somehow, though, he migrated to Shanghai, China where he worked as a confectionery [cake] baker before taking a ship to San Francisco in 1915 and working in a German-owned bakery in the city before he moved to Palo Alto.  By 1923, Schuh had relocated to Long Beach, where he opened his own bakery in the city's downtown.  By the end of the Twenties, he expanded his business to include a cafe and it looks as if he operated his business there through the 1930s. In the early Forties he worked at the famed Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.  Schuh, who married later in life, lived for a time in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley and for a longer stint in west Los Angeles, when he worked at the Ambassador, but returned to Long Beach for his remaining years and died after 1962.

Schuh owned his ranches for several years before arranging for a lease with the Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation.  In October 1938, the Los Angeles Times reported that the derrick was built and equipment being installed for a test well on the Schuh ranch, which was described as being 448 acres.  The site was said to have been "less than a mile north of a wildcat drilled by Marcell Petroleum nine years ago."  In addition, the article continued, "The Marcell hole was reported to have picked up sands at 1200 and 1600 feet, with oil and gas showings," this evidently providing enough encouragement and incentive to Schuh and Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation to give the area another shot.  Consequently, the new attempt was anticipated to hit commercial product between 1400 and 1600 feet down.

By early November, a date of the 15th had been selected to "spud in" the well, meaning to start actual drilling.  However, there were delays, and in late January 1939, the Times reported that Carbon Canyon Oil Corp. was readying the well, now called "Mills #1", and that the projected depth of hitting oil was now 1600 to 2000 feet.

In early April, the Times noted that John Hokom, whose efforts were detailed on this blog last year, began his work on 167 acres adjoining the lease of Carbon Canyon Oil Corp.  Meantime, the latter company was still trying to get its test well started and another delay pushed back the spudding to the 10th.  Once again, reference to George Marcell's 1929 test was made to show that there was some promise of oil to be located in the Carbon and Soquel canyons area and the paper alluded to the fact that there were four companies planning to drill in the area.

Finally, in early June, the Times noted that Carbon Canyon Oil Corp. finally began its test well drilling, a good eight months after it was supposed to begin work.  The depth was now stated to be 2000 feet.  Meanwhile, Hokom's well was reported to be a half-mile to the south, but twice as deep.

An article from the Santa Ana Register, 24 June 1939, discussing two oil projects on the 448-acre Schuh ranch in Carbon Canyon near where the Western Hills Oaks subdivision is now located.  From newspapers.com.

Then, a 24 June 1939 article in the Santa Ana Register revealed details about the Hokom/Schuh endeavors that the Times did not discuss.  Namely, even though Schuh foreclosed for his 448-acre ranch in the early Thirties against George Marcell and others, it turned out that the owner of the Carbon Canyon Oil Corporation was none other than Marcell.  Moreover, the Hokom well was on the Schuh ranch and the Los Angeles plumbing contractor spent $12,000 to acquire a 2 1/2% royalty interest from Schuh.  The article went on to state that Marcell had drilled a well nearby in 1929 and his newest effort "was started a month ago and a depth of 200 feet reached when [a] decision was reached to drill a deep test."

As was the case with the Urmi/Marcell well, however, John Schuh ran into financial problems quickly after starting his test well.  In December 1939, a foreclosure action was instituted against him by Oil Tool Exchange, Inc. on an October 1937 mortgage for a little over $15,000 payable over two years.  When only $2,500 of the borrowed sum was repaid, Oil Tool Exchange filed its foreclosure action.

Nearly two years later, in November 1941, the Schuhs filed their response and cross-complaint, acknowledging the note and the mortgage, but denying that they ever received the notice of the execution of those documents or that they got the money.

Instead, Schuh claimed that he had made an arrangement in June 1937 with the Louis C. Simmel Organization to extend up to $6,000 as a line of credit from an oil drilling project Simmel was engaged in at Kern County.  Then, Schuh maintained, Oil Tool Exchange made a secret arrangement with Simmel about its appropriating Schuh's debt to Simmel in lieu of monies owed to the company by Simmel and which the company sought to make good on in a September 1937 court filing!  

Further, Schuh argued that he "was in such financial difficulty that in order to protect his entire holdings from threatened involuntary bankruptcy proceedings" brought forth by Oil Tool Exchange, he and his wife agreed to execute the mortgage and note and paid $2,500 towards satisfying the terms.  The Schuhs prayed that the court would not only return the note and mortgage to them, allow the return of the $2,500 and give Oil Tool Exchange nothing, but asked for $15,000 in damages.

Finally, Schuh alleged that two documents involving a transfer of interests in the Kern County property to his wife and a quitclaim involving the property from the Schus' trust to themselves individually were, in the first case, a forgery and, in the second, a misrepresentation of what he thought was a lease, not a deed.  Schuh, however, could not prove the forgery allegation and the court found his argument on the quitclaim unfounded.

The trial court, in hearing the evidence, found that the situation was far more complex than argued by the Schuhs.  For example, the agreement with Simmel was unconditional and unlimited.  Moreover, the Simmels made arrangements to pay the Schuhs a 2 1/2% royalty for whatever was produced by the Kern County oil well and gave them a 20% interest in additional property for future development.

Moreover, it turned out that Oil Tool Exchange, Simmel and Schuh all worked with the same attorney, so that any claim by Schuh of trickery or malfeasance on the part of his partners was not demonstrated to the court, which also ruled that any allegations against the attorney were not relevant as points of law to the case.

After the trial court ruled against Schuh, he filed an appeal, but the appellate court upheld the lower court's determination in 1944, ending the matter.  The convoluted circumstances shown in the case revealing Schuh's financial distress probably explained how he lost his Long Beach bakery and cafe and took a job at the Ambassador Hotel.

The drilling of the Schuh well was clearly beyond his means, which is not an uncommon problem for would-be oil tycoons chasing black gold, especially in unproven areas like the Chino Hills portion of Carbon Canyon.  Its proximity to the mighty Olinda field convinced him, Marcell, Urmi Oil, Shelly Stoody, Homer May and others mentioned in this blog that there might be fortunes to be made, but they proved ultimately elusive.

A View of the Olinda Oil Field, ca. 1910

This post highlights an interesting cabinet card photograph of part of the Olinda oil field taken about 1910.

Given the topography of the hills and similar views, as well as the likelihood that the dirt road in the foreground is Carbon Canyon Road, it is apparent that the image shows a portion of the Santa Fe lease.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, under its subsidiary, the Southern California Railway, obtained land in the Olinda Ranch and partnered with Edward Doheny, whose Los Angeles City oil field project with Charles Canfield, was a major success in 1892 and afterward.

In 1897, Doheny drilled a well that became a major producer (and still is "on the pump" today as part of the Olinda Oil Museum) and inaugurated Orange County's first oil field.

Known as the Santa Fe lease, the property at the foothills of the Chino Hills range along the north end of Olinda was a successful field for many decades, and is now the location of the Olinda Ranch housing subdivision.  Santa Fe Road, a main road through the tract, is a reminder of the oil heritage there, along with the museum, which is located at 4025 Santa Fe Road in the upper reaches of the development.

The image shows a few dozen wells, associated pump houses and other structures.  The road is a simple dirt one with piles of dirt forming the shoulder.  Around this time, as noted in the last post, the roadway was fully built through to Chino and opened on 9 January 1915 and so has reached its centennial year.

The term "cabinet photograph," refers to a paper photo mounted (or glued) onto a stiff paper board--which were often stored in cabinets.  They were popular from about the 1880s through the 1920s.  This image was provided courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, which collects material relating to the oil history of the Los Angeles region because the Workman and Temple families had oil-related projects in the 1870s and 1920s in the area.

Here is a circa 1910 cabinet card photograph of a section of the Olinda oil field, most likely the Santa Fe lease with Carbon Canyon Road in the foreground.  Click on the image to see it in an enlarged view in a separate window.  Courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry, California.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Four

At the close of the 1930s, an oil well was drilled somewhere in the vicinity of either what is now the Western Hills Oaks subdivision or closer to the Mountain View tract off Canon Lane, south of Carbon Canyon Road.

The project was initiated by the John Hokom Oil and Gas Company, Ltd., a firm created by its namesake, a successful plumbing and hearing contractor born to Swedish emigrants (his father's name had been Hokansson] in the town of Galva in west-central Illinois in 1876.  After 1900, Hokom relocated to Los Angeles and opened his business which proved to be quite successful. 

Hokom was an active member of the state Master Plumbers' Association, an organization to promote professional practices in the rapidly-growing industry and served as its president in 1917.  Two years later, a trade journal noted that Hokom was "one of the most successful master plumbers in Los Angeles Cal." and that "at the present he is employing 25 mechanics; business is good and prospects are very bright for it to remain so."  This was especially true as the 1920s proved to be a significant decade for building in the Los Angeles area.

Hokom was in his early 60s  when he formed the John Hokom Oil and Gasoline Company, Limited, based at the Hollywood office of his plumbing and heating business, though it appears that his well in Carbon Canyon might have been his only project.  On 8 June 1939, Hokom filed his "Notice of Intention to Drill New Well" with the state Division of Oil and Gas on a lease of 40 acres.  It was estimated that gas would be found "at a depth of about 3500 feet" as noted on the form and some specifics were given in terms of the size of the casing, strings and so on.

Work began on 15 June as the hole was spudded.  By 11 July, the well was down to 2941 feet, but with nothing evidently found, it was decided the following day "to abandon hole from 2941' to 1395'."  On the 13th, 750 sacks of cement were poured into the hole and following days consisted of raising the plug and filling the hole with more cement and then it was decided to revise the project.

On the 18th, a supplementary proposal was submitted that called for redrilling at around 1300', because, it was stated, drillers "encountered two fairly good looking oil sands from 1110'-1252' and 1293'-1375' with thin shale partings and wet sands in between."  It was proposed to start back at 1295' and run a 7" string down to the 80 feet of the bottom of the lower sands.

By the 19th, the hole was "drilled out to 1298" at which time water testing was done and the well was pumped with 200 barrels of water and 34 grains of chloride per gallon through to 9 August.  It was reported that the hole "showed gas and colors of oil." 

But, in 17 August a well report was submitted to the Division of Oil and Gas that proposed "to circulate the hole full of heavy mud, pull all 7" casing possible, cap the 13" casing at the surface with a vented, welded cap and abandon the location."

A report of February 1940, noted that nearly a month passed before, instead of abandoning the well, Hokom went back, presumably with state permission, and, on the 14th, "put well to pumping at 1197'."  Fresh water was used and there were "slight showings of heavy oil and gas."  Yet, by 20 September, the drillers "pulled and paid town tubing and rods, abandoned hole from 1235'"  Cement was poured in and a plug placed at 1103' along with a vented plug in the casing, so that the "well [is] standing."  This meant that the well was not yet abandoned.

In May, Hokom submitted a letter to the state's Oil and Gas Supervisor, informing the agency that, concerning the bond obtained as insurance for drilling the well, Hokom wished to inform the bonding company, "that we have no further need of the above bond, as the well above mentioned was abandoned and capped in September 1939."  This was, as noted above, not true, as the well was left standing with plugs at a depth far below the surface.

Nearly eight years later, on 1 April 1948, a "Notice of Intention to Abandon Well" was filed with the Division of Oil and Gas, stating that the well was cemented to 1103' and that the proposed work to date and to "shoot and pull all 7" casing possible, place cemt. plug" to 266 feet and then "cap at surface and abandon."

A 26 April "Special Report to Operations Witnessed" from the state noted that work conducted on 18-19 April was for work that included "that the 7" casing was shot at 836' and was pulled from that depth," that "plugging operations were started by dumping cement in the hole on a wooden plug at 272'," and that "18 sacks of cement was [were] dumped in the hole beginning at 272'."  Once the cement plug was verified at 231', the abandonment was considered complete.

However, in mid-July 1948, a new well history was filed, showing that, on the 13th, "4 sacks of cement was [were] dumped on wood plug hanging at 10' placing of plug."  Consequently, this last action allowed the Oil and Gas Division to send a letter to Hokom's agent, informing him that the abandonment of the well was finally completed, nearly nine years after it was supposed to have been.

John Hokom lived for another seventeen years, dying in Los Angeles at 89 years of age in July 1965.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Three

There was a bit of excitement in October 1941 when it was reported in newspapers like the San Bernardino Sun that a young Yorba Linda oil prospector named Homer May claimed to bring in the only producing oil well then operating in San Bernardino County, right here in Carbon Canyon. 

According to the 28-year old May, who said he had ten years experience working in oil fields and that his father was a long-time oil worker, the gravity of the oil he found was much higher than that nearby and that the small volume of other wells would pale in comparison with the heavy flow that he asserted would come from his well "without pumping."

Notably, May stated that he had to drill his well in spurts on account of an inconsistent flow of funds, so that $5,000 had been expended over five months of work and claimed he would be working on drilling wells for other producers to raise the money to continue work on his wildcat well in Carbon Canyon.  He also identified the four partners in his Homer May Oil Company venture: H.H. Holloway, a pilot for TWA and three men said to be civil engineers hired by Los Angeles County, Allison Wallace, L.M. Hitchcock and Fred Jacobs.

Jacobs, born in Arizona in 1874 was a horse shoer as a young man in Los Angeles around the turn of the century, but, by 1910, was a city street inspector.  A decade later, he was a chief inspector and retained that position for many years with the civil engineering department.  Jacobs died at age 80 in 1954.  Louis M. Hitchcock was born in Fillmore, Minnesota in 1893 and resided in Alhambra by 1910 where he, his father and other siblings worked in the Alhambra Felt Factory, on the former plant property of the San Gabriel Wine Company at the west end of the city.  He became a City of Los Angeles public works inspector and died in 1968 and age 74.  Allison Wallace was born in 1877 in Canada and migrated to America at age 13, coming to Los Angeles soon after.  For years he was a clothing salesman with well-known stores like Mullen and Bluett and Desmond's before becoming an inspector with the City of Los Angeles by the mid-1920s.  He died in August 1962 at age 85.

Finally, there was Halbert Harold Holloway, born in 1896 in Bakersfield.  Joining the military in the First World War, he earned his brevet (license) in an air training program in France.  Returning home, he briefly operated his own airplane service near Bakersfield and then a charter service to and from Catalina Island for chewing gum magnate William Wrigley.  By 1928, he joined Western Air Express, a Los Angeles airline, which soon merged with Transcontinental Transport-Maddux, and became Transcontinental and Western Air (T&WA, later simply TWA.)  In 1930, he was the first American pilot to fly a four-engine airliner, a Fokker F-32.  In World War II, he served as a pilot in Europe ferrying soldiers and supplies in the theater of operations.  With war's end, he was appointed by TWA as the first manager of Ethiopian Airlines and was known to have many conversations with that nation's emperor Haile Selassie, an aviation enthusiast.  After two years in that job, Holloway returned to TWA until his mandatory retirement in 1956 at age 60.  For a quarter century afterward he followed his passion for gold prospecting in Nevada and then lived his last years in a nursing home in Ventura.

Clearly, Homer May's investors did not contribute large sums of money, if the total expenditure was a mere $5,000, however!

A map showing a "Portion of the 116 Acre Tract of Land" owned by Oasis Country Club, Ltd. and on which Homer May, Jr., a Yorba Linda resident, drilled a well that he claimed, in October 1941, struck oil, which would have been San Bernardino County's only producing oil well of the era.  Unfortunately, state Oil and Gas Division records show the well had "no showings of importance" and May failed to comply with state regulations on his project and on abandoning the well, which was done by an indemnity company five years later.  Click on the image to see it enlarged in a new window.

May claimed that he had drilled 1,000 feet to date and found oil sands that indicated a structure identical to that of wells in Orange County, presumably in the Whittier to Olinda belt, and that he had recorded the well to the state mining bureau.  The well was capped, but May indicated the drilling work would begin anew in ten days.

The problem with all of this was that it was almost entirely false.  May did submit an application with the state Oil and Gas Division to drill his well on 25 April and, despite not having all required information from May about the program for the operation, it gave him permission on 4 August to drill, subject to conditions based on good practices for drilling and preventing blowouts and the like.  The division was also to be notified if any oil was found and to be present for testing and examination for water shut-offs, cores and so on.

Despite May's statement that he notified the state of his operations, he did not report anything to them after approval was given and follow-up letters were sent to him by the Oil and Gas Division in May and June 1942.

Without any answer from May, the division contacted the landowner, Oasis Country Club, Ltd., in September 1943, nearly two years after May's claim of a successful producing well on the 116-acre Oasis property located south of Carbon Canyon Road in what appears to be today's Western Hills Oaks housing tract, developed in the mid-1960s.  The division's Carl Bloom called the Oasis Country Club, Ltd.'s secretary and treasurer, Major W. Driver and received a letter that stated:

I am furnishing you with the date of the Quit Claim Deed recording by Louise Rinehart and C.E. Brown, former Lessees on the Oasis Country Club property in Carbon Canyon, San Bernardino County, California, the date of recording was February 19 1942, in book 1526, page 59 of official records.  We understand that Homer May, Jr., had a Sub Lease from Rinehart and Brown for a portion of the property, but, so far as we have been able to determine, this Sub Lease was never recorded at San Bernardino.

A letter from Major W. Driver, secretary and treasurer of Oasis Country Club, Ltd., owner of the Carbon Canyon property where Homer May, Jr. drilled his allegedly-producing oil well in 1941.  The club's domain now appears to be where the Western Hills Oaks housing subdivision was created in the mid-1960s.  Click on the image to see it enlarged in a new window.

Finally, in August 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end, a "Notice of Intention to Abandon Well" was filed with the Oil and Gas Division by Royal Indemnity Company, which evidently insured the property for Oasis Country Club.  A report dated the 10th noted a rig was put up on the property on 30 November 1940 and that the well was drilled to 970 feet, at which point the cores fractured.  Notably, the report said there were "no showings of importance."  The state division gave permission to abandon the well per state law.

This work was finally conducted on 21 February 1946 as four workers, one from Chino, another from Puente and two from Pomona went in and cut the surface pipe, put in a 20-foot cement plug and welded a steel cap over that to seal the abandoned well.  On 4 March, the Oil and Gas Division sent a letter to Royal Indemnity to certify that all terms had been met for proper abandonment and the matter was, literally, closed.

May's parents owned a ranch on Citrus Street in Yorba Linda where his "Homer May Oil Company" address was given.  If Homer, Sr. had any oil experience, it doesn't show on census or other vital records—instead he is listed as a farmer and rancher from the time he moved to north Orange County in the 1910s. 

As for Junior, he was listed as an oil driller in the 1940 census, living on Valley View Street in Yorba Linda with his wife and two young children, but voter register information for 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940 and 1942 showed him as a truck driver living on Park Place in Yorba Linda, just a stone's throw from the boyhood home of President Richard M. Nixon, now the home of his presidential library and museum.

May lived in Huntington Beach for a time in the 1950s and then appears to have inherited his parents' ranch in Yorba Linda as he was shown there on voter records from the 1960s.  Evidently, he sold out and retired to Pismo Beach where he died at age 73 in 1986.  The Citrus Street ranch is now a cul-de-sac with tidy two-story tract homes on it—selling that property may well have been where Homer May, Jr. actually struck it rich.

Concerning the Oasis Country Club—more on that in a future post.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part Two

After the failed 1955 attempt by John Q. Tannehill to bring in oil on his 200-acre lease with Shelley Stoody on the latter's Double S Ranch, where today's Western Hills Country Club is located, another shot was taken at hitting black gold.

Albercalif [evidently, a combination of Alberta, the oil producing province in Canada and California] Petroleums, Ltd., with a local office established by Samuel M. Brooks in Long Beach in September 1952, was a foreign stock company based in Ontario, Canada. It had oil operations in Hanford in Kern Clounty and Whittier, Newport Beach and and Huntington Beach locally, and it appears to have drilled the well on the Double S for a Utah-based firm, Columbus-Rexall, which also had an office in Long Beach.  Consequently, the well was known as the Columbus-Rexall Stoody 30-4.

Sam Brooks was born in Cherokee Territory in Oklahoma about 1900 and was an oil driller in Long Beach before establishing his drilling contracting firm and then making connections with the Canadian investors in Albercalif.  His son, Robert, graduated from the University of Southern California School of Engineering in 1951 and had a classmate, Jack Crawford, son of an oilman, who hit it big in Huntington Beach and Sunset Beach while still in his early twenties and a USC student. 

Crawford hired the Brookses and Albercalif to drill his wells and evidently promised them a share in proceeds, though a lawsuit was filed in Fall 1955 by Brooks and his partners, Sol Marks and Morrie Morgan, alleging that Crawford failed to meet the terms of their agreement.  While the results of this suit haven't been found, it is an interesting sidelight that the young Crawford evidently kept plenty of his wealth, at least for a while, as he went on in the early Sixties to be an "pioneer" of ski partiers at the tony Colorado skiing mecca of Aspen.

Meantime, the Columbus-Rexall Oil Company was the result of a merger between two separate companies of those names operating in the precious metals business in Utah, meaning they mined for gold, silver and copper, and that firm's decision to become an oil company in 1957, just after the Stoody lease was being executed and a wildcat (meaning, in geologically unproven territory) well planned.

On 7 December 1956, Robert Brooks, as vice-president of Albercalif, filed a "Notice of Intention to Drill New Well" with the state Oil and Gas Divison with the well site being determined as within a short distance of the Tannehill well.  Receiving quick approval, Albercalif began operations the following day, spudding in the well in the morning and drilling down to over 350 feet.  For the next 24 days, the project continued, with the well casing cemented to about 415 feet and the hole deepened down to 3750 feet by the first of the new year.

A letter from 14 January 1957 by Shelley and Corrine Stoody informing the state Division of Oil and Gas that the dry wildcat oil well drilled on their Double S Ranch by Albercalif Petroleums for the Columbus Rexall Oil Company was to be converted to a water well.  Whether this was done or not, the well was never properly abandoned and, decades later, housing developer Meritage Homes had to make an attempt to complete the abandonment, but was physically unable to do so, so the well site remains as an undeveloped part of the tract finished by Warmington Homes and now known as Elements at Pine Valley Estates.  Click on the image to see it enlarged in a new window.

Finally, on 2 January 1957, it was decided to give up, though the approved application permitted a drilling depth up to 5,000 feet.  As was the case with the Tannehill well, Stoody arranged to have the well converted to a water well and sent a letter, this time signed by his wife Corinne as well, to the Division of Oil and Gas, to confirm the conversion.

Notably, a little problem developed with Samuel Brooks and his involvement with the Columbus-Rexall Oil Company.  Namely, in June 1957, that firm hired a Miami-based commodities trader and conducted an exchange of stock that purchased a Cuban oil firm, United Caribbean Oil Company--this was at the tail end of the notoriously-corrupt regime in that island nation just before the revolution of 1959 spearheaded by Fidel Castro.  Stock that was transferred was assigned values for sale to investors that failed to reflect the fact that Columbus Rexall had essentially no value and the scheme of manipulation of stock value was designed to provide profit for company executives.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) then filed charges in federal court against twenty-one individuals, including Sam Brooks, for their role in the fraud.  It took a few years to process the case against many of those involved, but a number of convictions and guilty pleas were obtained by 1963.  Several of the defendants received two-year sentences, some suspended and changed to probation, and fines of generally around $15-20,000.  Brooks was found guilty, according to an SEC publication, but his sentence was not given.  In any case, this is a tangent to the Columbus Rexall Stoody well in Carbon Canyon that has some interest.

As to that well, the collapse of Columbus Rexall meant that the state's legal requirements for properly abandoning the well were not met and it can't be determined whether the well was converted to water use by Stoody or left partially closed.  Within a few years, Stoody died in a 1961 plane crash on the Double S Ranch and the property sold by his widow to investors known as Carbon Canyon Properties, Inc., who then developed the Western Hills Golf Course, as well as maintained undeveloped land, on which was the well.

Fast forward about a half century from the original drilling of that well and part of the Double S Ranch is sold for a housing tract developed by Meritage Homes called Pine Valley Estates and then sold to a new developer, Warmington Homes, and refashioned as Elements at Pine Valley Estates.  This subdivision sits on the hillside to the north and west of Western Hills, but there was the little matter of the improperly abandoned well site.  Consequently, in 2006-07, Meritage had to go through the official process through the state of having the well properly abandoned—except that there was no way to actually fully close the well because of the incompleteness of the work back in 1957.  So, the provision for Meritage to build on the parcel was that the well site had to be left undeveloped and so it remains somewhere within the gated Elements community today.

Oil Drilling in Carbon Canyon's Chino Hills Portion, Part One

With the acquisition of some 400 acres in Carbon Canyon completed in 1952, industrialist and inventory Shelley M. Stoody established his Double S [get it?] Ranch as a base for raising purebred Polled Holstein bulls.  Stoody, however, also added a landing strip to indulge another passion, flying, which he had indulged in since he was a young man in Whittier in the 1920s. 

He and his wife Corinne also built themselves a single-story home atop the summit that gave a commanding view of the ranch and the canyon, a structure that still stands today.  As noted in an earlier post, after almost a decade of owning the ranch, Stoody was killed in 1961 when the twin-engine plane he was piloting was caught in a strong wind gust and driven into a hill, with Stoody and two other passengers dying and one other passenger surviving with serious injuries.

A side endeavor, however, for Stoody was the leasing of some of his property for oil prospecting and two wells were drilled on the ranch.  The first was drilled by John Q. Tannehill in a two-week period in late April and the first part of May 1955.  Tannehill came from an oil prospecting background.  His father, Lisle, was a cattleman, hardware merchant and insurance company co-owner from Roswell, New Mexico (yes, the UFO capital of the USA) who followed a brother and bought a second home in Hollywood in 1909 (and even dabbled a little in film production.)

The Tannehill Oil Company was formed in 1909 with $250,000 in stock and the bulk of the company's work was in the famed Midway-Sunset oil field near Bakersfield in Kern County.   The Tanehills also had oil operations in the Texas panhandle near Amarillo, where their father had settled, and then dabbled in wildcatting, which basically entails searching for oil in fields that had not been proved geologically through analysis and study, but are generally areas near existing successful fields.  For example, the Tannehill firm tried drilling near Corona, under the belief that a belt of untapped oil must have existed in somewhat of a line with the string of fields ranging from Montebello to Whittier to Brea and Olinda.

As for John, he was born in 1910 and raised in Roswell and graduated from the New Mexico Military Institute in 1930.  A few years later, he was working as a salesman in the family hardware business and appears to have had a hand in the Tannehill oil enterprise, as well.  In the mid-1950s, in his mid-forties, Tannehill went in with a partner, Robert A. Pierce in the "Li-Jo Oil Company," based out of an office on Spring Street in Los Angeles and which had at lease one other oil drilling project near Bakersfield, with his lease of 200 acres on Stoody's Double S Ranch.

This plat map accompanied the paperwork concerning the drilling of an oil well by John Q. Tannehill on the Double S Ranch, owned by Shelley M. Stoody, at what is now the Western Hills Country Club on the Chino Hills portion of Carbon Canyon.  Carbon Canyon Road runs from the lower left to upper right, between the numbers 36 and 31 [these being section numbers] with the summit appearing to be just above where it reads "Parcel No. 4" and the well was located above that in a square to the left of where it says "No. 1" for the parcel of that number.  This would be at the far north portion of the golf course, the lake of which is fed from springs that this well, converted for water use, would tap.  Click on the image to see it enlarged in a new window.

He filed a "Notice of Intention to Drill New Well" form with the state's Division of Oil and Gas on 13 April, received approval, and within a couple of days work began.  The well was spudded (started) on the 16th and the first 150 feet were drilled that day.  After cementing the casing to that depth, drilling continued on the 18th down to 1070 feet.  Over another week the work got down as far as 2150 feet, the intended depth approved for on the application.

What was found was shale at the shallow level, water and sand down to 1400 feet, sandy shale at 1800 feet, and hard sandy shale below that.  Once Tannehill had gone as far as he was approved to go, there was no choice but to give up when no deposits of oil were found.  That's the inherent risk of any drilling, but especially wildcatting.

So, on 5 May, Tannehill filed a "Notice of Intention to Abandon Well," and submitted a letter dated the previous day on Stoody's Double S. Ranch letterhead (address: "Summit Carbon Canyon, Route 3, Box 61, Chino, California") that stated:

I, S.M. Stoody, owner of property leased by Mr. John Q. Tannehill, request the well be left in condition to make a water well.  I will accept responsibility of developing or abandoning said well according to the rules of the State of California, Division of Oil & Gas."

It is evident from a plat map (shown here) that went along with the paperwork for the well drilling project that the dry well was dug somewhere in the vicinity of the upper portion of today's Western Hills Golf Course.

As for the Tannehill family's larger oil firm, it still existed until 1996 when its many assets were sold to the Berry Petroleum Company for $25.2 million, including 600 acres in Kern County producing 1400 barrels of oil per day and reserves of some 7.1 million barrels, as well as a power plant--all located near the oil town of Taft.

A little sidenote on this is that the Tannehills bought, in the 1910s, a portion of the Topo Ranch in San Benito County.  This ranch had been purchased in 1860 by Patrick Breen and his son Edward, survivors of the tragic Donner Party that had been trapped by blizzards in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near today's Truckee in 1846.  Breen died in 1868 and his descendants owned the ranch for decades afterward until losing the last of it in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  In the 1940 census, Lisle, his wife Lillian and their son John resided on the ranch.  Incidentally, there is a clothing line, run out of Venice Beach here in Los Angeles, that draws its inspiration from the Topo Ranch.

Next up, the second of the two oil wells drilled on Shelley Stoody's Double S Ranch . . .