After Oil Boomtown's Bust, Nature Added Its Blows
Decades before there were automobiles, there was Mentryville: California's first oil boomtown, not far from Los Angeles. Its first gusher kept producing for 114 years.
Gold turned up in these parts seven years before the 1849 Gold Rush. Cattleman Francisco Lopez pulled a few wild onions out of the ground and noticed flakes in the roots. San Fernando placers, as they were called, poured into Placerita Canyon in what is now the Santa Clarita area. The prospecting was good, but not exceptional, for several years.
More than 30 years later, a Frenchman discovered black gold in nearby Pico Canyon. Mentryville became a thriving company town from 1876 until the Great Depression and, more recently, a tourist attraction. But a 2003 brush fire lapped at its fringes, and 2004's storms flooded its buildings.
What's left of the 850-acre town site about five miles west of Newhall includes a red barn, a two-story 13-room mansion and a one-room schoolhouse. Then there's the legendary ghost.
Mentryville's history is told from old Times news stories, the Friends of Mentryville website and an interview with the group's former president, Duane Harte, who owns an advertising firm and has lived in the Santa Clarita Valley for 32 years.
Charles Alexander "Alex" Mentrier was born in France in 1846. His father, a blacksmith, brought the family to the United States seven years later and anglicized their surname.
Alex Mentry was a quick study, drilling 42 successful oil wells in Pennsylvania before looking west. He arrived in San Francisco in 1873 and then moved south, working for a drilling company in Grapevine Canyon, between Los Angeles and Kern County. (This is the Grapevine known today more for snow than for oil -- especially this time of year.)
Two years later, Mentry, 29, teamed up with Demetrius G. Scofield, head of the fledgling California Star Oil Works. They bought oil claims on land that had belonged to Gen. Andres Pico, commander of the Mexican forces in the Mexican American War. Pico had begun digging for oil in 1865, with little luck.
Mentry deepened one of Pico's wells and drilled two new ones. Discouraged by the modest yield, he sold his share of the claim to Scofield -- who offered him a handsome salary to run the drilling operation.
On Sept. 26, 1876 -- a mere three months after Mentry sold out -- he rolled up his grease-splattered sleeves and, using an old railroad axle as a drill, brought in well No. 4, the gusher. Scofield became a rich man; his company was eventually acquired by Standard Oil, predecessor of Chevron.
