The Gaines and Brown Families of Carbon Canyon, Part 13: More Photos from the Flying Cow Ranch at Olinda

With thanks once more to Joyce Harrington for sharing photos of the Brown and Gaines families, who lived in the Carbon Canyon and Olinda areas for decades, here is another set of great images of scenes at the Flying Cow Ranch.

The ranch, established by Edward F. Gaines, was located where today's Olinda Village community is situated just outside the mouths of Carbon and Soquel canyons.  The Craftsman-style residence stood where the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates is on the south side of Carbon Canyon Road, while the majority of the ranch was north of the state highway.

The Craftsman-style house of the Gaines family's Flying Cow Ranch.  The site is now Hollydale Mobile Home Estates in Olinda Village, south of Carbon Canyon Road.  All photos are courtesy of Joyce Harrington.  Click on any to see them enlarged in a separate window.

As noted here before, Gaines lived in the community of Clearwater, so named because of the many artesian wells drilled in the area.  That hamlet, along with Hynes, were among the first in the region to experiment with sugar beets in the late 19th century, a crop that made Chino famous, as well. 

After the sugar beet era died out, Clearwater and Hynes, along with adjacent areas like Artesia and Cerritos, became the center of a massive and profitable dairy industry.  The region was regarded as "The Milk Shed of Los Angeles" and "The World's Largest Hay Market," as the growing of hay to feed the cows was an adjunct industry of significance. 

A hunting party at the Flying Cow.  The distinctive hill in the background is on the west end of the Olinda Village subdivision.

The dairy industry reigned supreme in the area until after World War II when massive immigration and large-scale suburban development rendered the land far more valuable for housing, commercial business and other uses.  The dairy farmers of Clearwater and Hynes, as well as neighboring communities, then headed inland to Chino and Ontario.  With developing spreading further into the Inland Empire, the dairies have been, are now and will continue to be leaving our region for greener pastures elsewhere.

Gaines, who lived from the 1870s to the 1950s, experienced the stunning transformations of life in the region from the late 19th century to the jet age and all of the technological and other innovations that went along with it. 

Ed Gaines' prized stagecoach, which he and a grandson restored and which was taken to parades and other events until it was destroyed in a September 1939 fire at the Flying Cow Ranch.

In many ways, he was a holdover from an earlier age, though, and his Flying Cow Ranch was a rural retreat where he hunted, kept horses and livestock, and stored his vintage stagecoach.  This latter was a particular pride and joy for Gaines, who took it to all kinds of public events and rode it as a reminder of pre-automobile days of transportation.  Sadly, a barn fire in 1939 killed some of Gaines' prized horses and destroyed the coach.

Having these photos provided by Joyce is a great way to document the history of Carbon Canyon and Olinda, especially as the oil wells at the latter are gradually being shut down and removed for more suburban development.

A view at the Flying Cow Ranch and which appears to look north into where most of the Olinda Village tract is now.

Check back again soon for more great historic images of the Gaines and Brown families of Carbon Canyon and Olinda, including the Olinda oil field and Olinda School.

The Gaines and Brown Families of Carbon Canyon, Part 12: A Trio of Photos at the Olinda Oil Field

Joyce Harrington, a descendant of the family of Edward F. Gaines and Fannie Atwater, who owned by the Flying Cow Ranch where Olinda Village and the Hollydale Mobile Home Estates are today, as well as from the Brown family who lived and worked in the Olinda oil field, generously provided access to hundreds of photos of both families.

This is the twelfth post in the series sharing these photos on the blog and comprises a trio of images of workers at the oil field, which was opened in 1897 after Edward Doheny, who with Charles Canfield brought in the celebrated Los Angeles field west of downtown, developed a partnership with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad to drill for oil on the Olinda Ranch.

This great image shows, from left to right, Andy Lyle, Earl Brown, a man listed only as Kramer, and Foster Norton at an oil well site in Olinda in 1910.

Railroads were in the process of transitioning to petroleum fuels and the Santa Fe had a line running through north Orange County along modern Orangethorpe Avenue, so prospectiing for oil in the hills at the north end of the Olinda Ranch and following geological traces from the Whittier and Puente fields to the west led to success. 

In fact, the first well brought on to production at Olinda is still operating today as part of the Olinda Oil Museum in the midst of the Olinda Ranch subdivision just north of Carbon Canyon Road.  From there, companies flocked to the field to search for black gold.  As noted, there was a substantial population of workers and their families mostly living in company-owned houses throughout the field.  Stores and a fine grammar school were part of the general Olinda community, though as the automobile became more affordable, people began to move to nearby towns away from the noises and smells of the field.

In this snapshot, Earle Brown is doing a little clowning around at the well site.  With such difficult, dirty work, there must obviously have been a lot of humor displayed at Olinda!

There were some people, though, who continued to reside in the field even when most moved away, so that Olinda School continued to operate into the very early 1960s.  Finally, the school closed and a new Olinda Elementary School was built in the Olinda Village subdivison on the former Flying Cow Ranch.  The old school site, near the Carbon Canyon Dam, which was completed in 1961, later became part of Carbon Canyon Regional Park, opened in 1975.

With regard to the oil wells, they've gradually been shut down, disassembled and capped in recent decades, replaced mainly by housing developments, and those that remain will not do so for long.  As noted here recently, a proposal to build a large number of homes on land on both sides of Valencia Avenue north of Rose Drive/Birch Street and both sides of Lambert Road west of Carbon Canyon is in the works.

This is a particularly interesting image of seventeen well-dressed gents with a train and presumably this was the celebration of the arrival of the first train to use the Santa Fe spur line from Atwood to Olinda.  Although there are numbers with the men for identification, there was no list provided.

It won't be too many years from now that the only visual remainder of the oil industry at Olinda, where petroleum prospecting was launched in Orange County over 120 years ago, will be at the oil museum.  Photos like these help preserve that history for those who won't otherwise have a direct visual reference to what transpired at Olinda.

Look soon for the thirteenth part of this series of great images, courtesy of Joyce, from the Brown and Gaines families at Carbon Canyon.