by Paul R. Spitzzeri
With F.P.F. Temple in the 1870s and his son Walter some four decades later both involved in the oil industry in greater Los Angeles, the “Drilling for Black Gold” series of posts here has traced some of the history of that important aspect of the local economy through the Roaring Twenties—the presence of oil drilling, however, has diminished greatly in recent years in this area and, of course, the fossil fuel industry is under significant pressure to phase out in the face of mounting climate change.
One of the few remaining areas of production in the region is about ready to be retired: this being a large section of the Olinda oil field in the northeast portion of the city of Brea (itself named for the tar that was found in the vicinity—F.P.F. Temple and William Workman owned some of the land in Brea Canyon in the 1860s and 1870s). This field, the first producer in Orange County, sprung up in 1897 with the completion of a well by Edward L. Doheny in partnership with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, which was looking to expand the use of petroleum as a locomotive fuel.
The name Olinda, however, was bestowed in the area about a decade prior when William Hervey Bailey (1843-1910) arrived by way of Hawaii. Bailey’s parents, Edward and Caroline (nee Hubbard) were, like F.P.F.’s brother Jonathan, Congregationalists from Massachusetts, who migrated to what were then commonly called the Sandwich Islands. They arrived as part of a missionary group in 1837, some fifteen years or so after Jonathan Temple settled in Honolulu as a merchant.
After a brief period on the “Big Island” of Hawai’i, the Baileys were transferred to Maui, first at Lahaina (recently ravaged by wildfires) and then across the island at Wailuku—their home there is a historic site known as the Bailey House Museum and is the headquarters for the Maui Historical Society. Edward Bailey also ran a women’s school there, but, in 1849, ended ties with missionary work and went into business as a sugarcane grower, with a plantation in the Kula highlands on the slopes below the famous Haleakala volcano named Olinda. The name was adopted from the famed area of Brazil colonized by the Portuguese in the 1530s and where sugarcane was raised—the Brazilian city of Olinda is a UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
Bailey spent almost a decade in Honolulu attending the Punahou School, established for missionary children, and then joined the family business. In 1869, he married Anna Hobron, whose ship captain father built the first railroad on Maui, used to ship sugar to the port at Kahului, adjacent to Wailuku. After working with the Planters Labor and Supply Company, a firm working for the sugarcane industry in securing cheap foreign labor, Bailey and his family (including two children) as well as his parents, migrated to California, settling in Oakland in 1885.
Not long after the relocation, the Boom of the Eighties burst forth in greater Los Angeles, driven significantly by the Santa Fe’s completion of a direct transcontinental line to the area at the end of the year the Baileys came from Hawai’i. At the end of March 1887, Bailey acquired nearly 5,000 acres recently held by James W. Shanklin and which involved a sale price of nearly $68,000. As was often the case, Hawaii’s missionaries moving into business often were able to amass significant fortunes and here was an investment of sizable proportions.
Obviously recognizing that boomtime conditions were propitious for subdividing ranch lands into smaller farm tracts and townsites, Bailey moved on those two fronts, establishing the Olinda Ranch, which began to be listed for sale in early 1888 as the home of “fertile farms and beautiful villa sites,” and the town of Carlton, where, it was claimed, 75% of the lots were sold in just a month, over sixty houses were contracted for construction, lot prices skyrocketed 400%, and a hotel was readied for building.
Soon after, however, the boom went bust and the timing just was not right for Bailey’s grand ambitions for his property. Carlton disappeared, as many of the boom towns did during that period, though some of the streets remain just off the northeast corner of Imperial Highway and Rose Drive in Placentia and Yorba Linda. As for the ranch subdivision, some of those tracts were sold, as well, but Bailey retained most of it, including during the 1890s when a national depression and several years of drought took place.
A decade after his attempts at subdivision largely failed, however, Bailey was basically bailed out when Doheny struck oil in spring 1897. Working with a Santa Fe executive named Almon Maginnis on land leased by the railroad company, Doheny supervised the drilling of what still exists and operates as Well #1 at the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail, tucked away in the Olinda Ranch housing tract. The Los Angeles Times of 28 April 1897 published a report from what was denoted as “Oil Center” and which began with:
This new metropolis has sprung unheralded upon the world, and probably this is the first time its name has been seen in print. It is true there has at present no great showing been made here, and yet the possibilities of the location seem unbounded. Oil Center is the name given to the section where Maginnis & Doheny have struck oil in a well sunk under contract with the Santa Fe [rail]road. It lies six miles northeast of Fullerton and about four miles southeast of the Puente wells.
As to the latter geographical references, Fullerton was an 1880s boomtown while the Puente oil field was established in the early 1880s by William R. Rowland, son of Rancho La Puente grantee John Rowland, and Los Angeles capitalist William Lacy. Another driller in that locale was Burdette Chandler, a Boyle Heights resident, who also engaged in oil exploration at Petrolia, located just east of Olinda in Soquel Canyon, this being the first attempt at drilling for black gold in what became Orange County in 1889.
The Times piece went on to note that oil was found at just 400 feet, although the well was drilled twice as deep. It was observed that it was clear there was abundant crude there “though the managers avoided giving out any estimates as to the amount of oil found,” because there was a great deal of sand found in the deposits so cleaning was continually carried on. Once the sand was removed it was expected that information would be released concerning output at the well.
Still, the account continued, “that the strike which has been made is satisfactory to the owners of the well is evident from the fact that they are already planning to have the oil piped to Fullerton, where, under an eight-year contract, it will be turned over to the Santa Fe company.” Moreover, timber was already on the ground for a second well some 500 feet and, once oil was flowing from the first, that next one was to be drilled.
It was added that,
It is no news to those who have given attention to the petroleum industry that this section gives evidence of being rich in oil. There is probably no place in the State where there is a greater exhibit of brea than on this chain of hills. The oil has seeped out of the ground in dozens of places . . . This brea is found in spots in a line extending from the Puente wells past Oil Center and many miles to the eastward. That somewhere under this ground is a vast deposit of oil men have believed for a score of years, and this is not the first attempt made to locate it [Chandler’s Petrolia being mentioned above].
The Olinda strike was not from the same source as the Rowland and Lacy one at Puente as they were from different trending geological strata and the paper commented that if oil was found in the quantities anticipated, “there is every reason to believe that the output of Oil Center will make the place worthy of its name” with development expected along up to a dozen miles in the section.
It was also reported that, with 3,000 acres under their control, Maginnis and Doheny had no near competition, though the Union Oil Company had a large holding in the area (its presence in Brea became a major one in subsequent decades) and a Pomona bank owned land in nearby Tonner Canyon in what some maps earlier denoted as the original Brea Canyon. Soon after, the Brea Canyon field in a rodeo, or abrupt turn in the landscape, became a major location for prospecting.
Still, it was cautioned that “there has been and still is a point of considerable uncertainty as to the location of the oil underground” in terms of determining where crude flowed from rock strata as “the whole country is badly upturned.” The first well was northeast of a brea deposit and the second was located near another such seepage and it was presumed that Maginnis and Doheny “believe that the rocks slope downward to the north.” Should this assumption have proved to be true, the future development of the district would be based on this information.
In fact, by 1900, there was a mad rush of activity at what was generally termed the “Fullerton Oil Field” but which was really centered in and around the Olinda Ranch, with nearby Brea Canyon soon tapped as a significant site. For Bailey, this proved to be a godsend as his Olinda Oil Company, rechristened the Olinda Land Company, became a major producer in the new field in subsequent years, including when the featured photos here were snapped on this date in 1916.
Just after Bailey’s death in 1910, a new era of increased prospecting and resulting production took place and was noted in the local press. The Santa Ana Register of 15 August 1911, for example, reported,
Throughout the Olinda oil field there is enthusiasm in the pursuit of production such as was never before equalled in its history. Each week brings a stronger belief that great things are near at hand in the matter of expansion of territory and large increase in production of high gravity oil in the field.
In fact, early on Doheny’s oil under the auspices of the Santa Fe was redirected to the Standard Oil Company because that high gravity made it far more valuable on a broader market using petroleum products than for locomotive use, even as the railroad industry turned to oil as the dominant fuel during this period including later product from Olinda. In the early Teens, the Santa Fe built a spur line from Atwood in Placentia to Olinda to ship crude to the main line.
In 1913, the railroad company made a deal with General Petroleum in which the latter acquired the oil generated from Olinda and other fields held by the Santa Fe and by which General would supply the transportation giant of fuel for its locomotives. Other developments of note include the increasing development of land in the area including the towns of La Habra, Randolph and Yorba Linda in a belt serviced by the expansion of the Pacific Electric Railway streetcar system.
Randolph, named for a PE executive, Epes Randolph, was established in 1910, though the name was soon changed to Brea. In mid-February 1916, the Register reported, a new Brea township was formed including the Olinda oil field section. This is why the local high school is still called Brea-Olinda. Meanwhile, the breadth of the oil-bearing region expanded outward from the core of the Santa Fe lease and took in hundreds of acres.
The population of Olinda grew quickly as the number of companies and wells drilled and put into production skyrocketed in the first few decades of the 20th century. The 1900 census, taken a few years after the first well came in, tallied 123 persons, while a decade later, the number of residents ballooned to 1,436. With the growth of nearby towns and the increasing availability and affordability of the automobile, however, the population dropped, though oil production rose. In 1920, there were some 935 denizens of the Olinda community, while ten years after, the population dropped by about half to 462.
Other than its famed oil output, Olinda was, in the early 20th century, known for a prominent human export: baseball pitching legend Walter “Big Train” Johnson (1887-1946). The Kansas native moved to the oil town with his family at age 14 and achieved renown for his stellar record at Fullerton High School and Olinda oil worker teams. In early 1907, Johnson, who’d moved to Idaho, pitched for a semi-pro team there and amazed crowds with his performance, leading to his signing to the Washington Senators of the American League.
In his 21-year career, Johnson, who could throw more than 90 miles per hour at a time when most pitchers threw far slower, compiled a 417-279 win-loss record (only Cy Young had more victories at 511), including 110 shutouts—this still a record. This was for a team that was never among the elite in the league, there was one World Series title in 1924, and his 3,508 strikeouts remained the highest in major league history for well over a half-century. This was a time when strikeouts were not as common as they would become later and Johnson proved to be an excellent hitter for a pitcher with a .235 batting average over his career. When the Baseball Hall of Fame had its inaugural election in 1936, Johnson was one of the first five inductees along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner.
The last remaining Olinda oil fields are now being dismantled for a series of housing projects under the Brea265 plan, the number referring to the number of acres involved as some 60 oil wells are decommissioned and more than 1,000 residential units constructed. The termination of production at Olinda will be the end of an era spanning nearly 130 years for an industry that transformed and enriched greater Los Angeles while contributing to the climate change with which we are now confronting as a dramatically increasing threat.