by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a warm day, the hottest of the year so far, as the second offering of guided tours of the Tres Hermanos Ranch, a 2,450-acre tract owned by the City of Industry and situated in the cities of Chino Hills (about 70%) and Diamond Bar (some 30%) and which is one of the last large-scale undeveloped parcels in the region, were held.
The three municipalities comprise the Tres Hermanos Conservation Authority (TRCA) and it was under the auspices of the organization that the first public access to this remarkable place was provided last September. As with that inaugural program, today consisted of four excursions by tram from the Diamond Bar Community Center ferrying roughly 20 persons per group with city managers Ben Montgomery (Chino Hills) and Dan Fox (Diamond Bar) in each vehicle to explain aspects of the ranch’s management and help keep the event moving smoothly.
There were a trio of stops with staff from each city assisting in the set-up, operation and clean-up and providing signage, boards and other important support and where City of Industry City Manager Josh Nelson, at Arnold Reservoir, Cal Poly Pomona Emeritus Professor Dan Hostetler and yours truly provided information on current conditions and activities, the natural world and landscape and the history of Tres Hermanos. The TRCA’s coordination and collaboration went, as before, very smoothly and made for a great experienced for the guests.
The history portion was given at the ranch headquarters, comprising a 1920s-era residence, still used on a part-time basis by one of the three lessees running livestock there (the others are the north and south ends of the ranch, respectively); a barn dating back to around that time, a tack room, blacksmith shop, garage, silos and corrals and pens. At September’s tours, an ad hoc addition included John Arnold, whose family leased the ranch for close to 70 years, and who provided some information about that long tenure.
For today’s visit, John and his mother Linda met with me yesterday at the Homestead, sharing photos, information and stories about their family’s history there and then they, accompanied by a relative, Annette, and her husband, Mitch, were present this morning to give further detail about the Arnold family’s operations at Tres Hermanos. As we’ve found at the Museum, having descendants of people associated with the place is of great benefit and interest to visitors, who get to experience primary source recollections that can’t be replicated by newspapers and other secondary sources.
Given the weather, we had the guests gather under the ample shade of a very old pepper tree next to the residence, using boards generated by the staff at the City of Chino Hills and maps provided by the City of Industry, as well as photos, cattle brands and other material that the Arnolds brought with them. Despite the presence of a rattlesnake by the blacksmith shop, visitors also were able to see these outbuildings as part of their experience.
In the brief overview provided, it was mentioned that, one of the tres hermanos (three brothers, who were not blood related but had close business ties) who acquired the ranch in the 1910s was William Benjamin Scott (1858-1920), whose relationships with the other two owners, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and William R. Rowland, former Los Angeles County sheriff, oil company owner and son of the Rancho La Puente’s co-owner John Rowland, went back to the late 1890s.
Scott was born in Madison County, Missouri, southeast of Kansas City, where his father William was a farm laborer. In the last half of the 1870s, the family migrated west and ended up in Saticoy in Ventura County and, as a young man, Scott, after apprenticeship as a carpenter, began work as an oil rig builder and driller for Lyman Stewart and Wallace L. Hardison, who began their operations near Santa Paula in 1883.
Stewart hailed from Venango County, Pennsylvania, where America’s oil industry began at Titusville in 1859 and, after early struggles (with his service for the Union Army in the Civil War interspersed) to develop his own oil wells with brother Milton, found some success. An investment with a farm reaper project, however, drained his savings and, in 1873, Stewart went bankrupt and, as a deeply religious person, he was deeply discouraged by the failure.
Shortly afterward, he met Hardison, a relative of a friend and a native of Caribou, Maine, in the northeastern reaches of the state near Canada (and where Sen. Susan Collins and astronaut Jessica Meir were from). Hardison had two older brothers, James and Harvey, precede him to Pennsylvania and he established a partnership with Stewart.
There was a decent recoupment from their work in the oil fields of Venango County, but, as John D. Rockefeller furthered his near-monopoly of American production, the two sold to him and relocated to Ventura County. Scott began work as a driller with S.C. Graham and William Loftus for the Hardison and Stewart company and he was praised by Stewart for always leaving a clean hole due to the meticulousness of his operations.
Hardison and Stewart formed an important partnership with Thomas Bard, another Pennsylvania native who went to Ojai after service as a Union scout during the war to look after interests of his powerful uncle, Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad and who asked his nephew to oversee oil drilling. Bard was successful in that venture and is often credited for bringing in California’s first well in 1867. Later a United States Senator, Bard joined the other two oil figures in 1890 in establishing Union Oil, which later moved to Los Angeles.
Scott was a Union employee until he and Loftus formed a company in 1894 to drill in the newly opened Los Angeles Oil Field, northwest of downtown. This area was established by Charles Canfield and Edward L. Doheny, who drifted into the Angel City from New Mexico and with a very crude (!) operation and limited funds, hit a pool of oil and started their fabled careers. Over several years, Scott and Loftus drilled at 1st Street (now Beverly Boulevard) and Burlington Avenue, where the former long resided, and nearby at 1st/Beverly and Union. In 1896, he married Hardison’s cousin, Luna, and the couple had two children: Josephine and (William) Keith.
The big move, however, came in 1898 when Scott established the Columbia Oil Company with Wallace Hardison, Hardison’s son Guy, Chandler and Times managing editor Leroy E. Mosher. Soon renamed the Columbia Oil Producing Company, the firm operated out of an office in the Tajo Building and owned nearly 300 acres and leased more than 600 in the booming Olinda Oil Field, in what was then called the Fullerton district.
Doheny brought in Orange County’s first well in 1897 and Columbia immediate secured its lands from the former properties of Abel Stearns as well as of the Olinda Land Company, and, not surprisingly, the firm was tied to Union Oil, while Loftus and Graham were adjacent, as was the Santa Fe lease which was where Doheny made his big strike. By 1900, Columbia had two producing wells at Olinda and expanded that in subsequent years.
A June 1910 article in the Los Angeles Record recorded that initial operations by Columbia were slow but “persistence . . . eventually triumphed over adverse circumstances,” so that, in 1907, the first dividends were paid to shareholders “and they have been coming steadily ever since,” totaling nearly $300,000 to date. The firm had 18 producing wells and also acquired a half-interest in the Puente Oil Company.
Puente was established by Rowland and partner William Lacy with a successful well in the early 1880s on Rowland’s land on Rancho La Puente inherited from his father John and the site was at the crest of the Puente Hills near where Harbor Boulevard/Fullerton Road comes through that range. A series of producers made the firm one of the early oil success stories in greater Los Angeles and the firm built a refinery in Chino, with the pipeline running through the Tres Hermanos Ranch.
The half-interest acquired by Columbia was effected in 1903 and the Los Angeles Express reported that it meant the combined leasing or ownership of more than 4,000 acres in the Puente Hills, Olinda and Chino. The two firms then had 85 wells yielding some 20,000 barrels of crude monthly, with the product traveling through fifteen miles of pipe to the refinery generating 800 barrels each day. A half-dozen pumping plants, ten drilling rigs with tools, a repair shops and steel tanks for storing up to 10,000 barrels each were also included.
While the company bore the Puente name, it having more public recognition as it the oil was sold commercially, Columbia continued operating its wells, generating some 5,000 barrels monthly, under its own name. Rowland retained the presidency, while Scott became vice-president and stockholders included such figures as lawyer and banker Jackson A. Graves, banker Herman W. Hellman, Wallace and Guy Hardison, and Chandler.
Not quite a decade later, another merger transpired, involving the addition of the Orange and Pico oil companies, of which Scott was the founding presidents in 1907 and 1909, respectively, with the Puente-Columbia concern. Naturally, the Times in its coverage on 11 June 1912 spoke very highly of the latest conglomeration, including Rowland’s land company, given what it noted:
The amalgamation brings into existence an organization of exceptional strength, not only in the great value of its resources, but in the character and ability of the men of which it is composed. It will undoubtedly be a powerful factor in the California oil business, not only as a producer but as a distribution of refined oils.
The new company will be known as the Columbia Oil Producing Company [the existing name of that previously separate firm] . . . [Officers] will be: W.B. Scott, president; W.B. Scott, William R. Rowland, Gen. M[oses]H. Sherman, Chester W. Brown, William L. Stewart [Lyman’s son], Frank Pfaffinger [the Times’ treasurer] and Harry Chandler, directors.
Two years later, the paper ran a feature praising Columbia’s reputation for providing an enviable work environment for its employees, the paper noting the firm’s “surroundings are pleasant,” an interesting word to use for the oil industry, “and with the most congenial atmosphere about the relations of the employer to the employed.” In turn, the emphatic open shop (anti-union) Times asserted, “the men are inclined to remain on the Columbia leases for a long period of time.”
Cited as core to this situation was “the genial character of W.B. Scott . . . a thoroughly practical oil man, who is exceedingly familiar with oil operators and their ways,” having, of course, started as a driller in the fields. The paper added “Mr. Scott is known as a first-class man to work for” and one innovation was the Columbia assisted employees in owning their residences as well as being given natural gas from the firm’s inventory, while unmarried men enjoyed an “eating house” with some of the food growing on the company’s leased land.
At Olinda, the paper observed, “the houses of employees, well shaded by overhanging trees, are right in the midst of a famous old producing section of the Fullerton oil fields.” The piece went on to note that Columbia produced some 80,000 barrels of crude monthly, a large amount for an independent operator, while profits in 1913 topped $500,000 with 40% of that paid out in dividends. The Chino refinery was cited as a main source of operating revenue as “the company is one of the few in the State which controls such a plant” in addition to a gasoline plant on the Puente Hills land.
Shortly after this, Chandler, Rowland and Scott purchased the land that became their Tres Hermanos Ranch under the auspices of the Rowland Cattle Company. He was also among those involved in the development of a massive 47,000-acre portion of the San Fernando Valley (again, with Chandler a key figure), having a stake in the Rancho El Tejon north of Los Angeles (Chandler being a major owner), and joining Union Oil executives in acquiring much of the Rancho La Merced—formerly half-owned by F.P.F. Temple and lost to “Lucky” Baldwin after the 1876 failure of the Temple and Workman Bank—and where, in addition to oil development, Scott took possession of the Soto-Sánchez Adobe and remodeled it for a “country” residence.
Scott was also a director Citizens National Bank and had other business interests, including as a shareholder in a syndicate (including the Hardisons and associates from Maine and Pennsylvania) that took ownership of the Los Angeles Herald; being a founding trustee of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, being a financer of an “aerial torpedo” plane with Chandler and a slew of Los Angeles capitalists, owning stock in the Los Angeles Pacific Navigation Company. In September 1919, the Times ran a feature on a special bonus given to all 200 Columbia employees, who received a check amounting to 10% of the aggregated amount of money worked during the entirety of their career.
Coming as a transfer of Columbia stock was to be made to Commonwealth Petroleum for $6 million, the bonus was not quite $110,000, with about three-quarters to Columbia and the remainder to Puente Oil and Scott and Rowland, respectively, signed letters announcing the windfall. In his missive, Scott noted that any veterans of the recently concluded First World War were paid, during their absence serving their country, as if still at work and on the payroll—this included one man who died during his service and another who was injured.
Telling employees that “the new owners of shares in this company . . . expect to continue the work practically as heretofore,” Scott added that “we venture to express the hope that in the future you will give the same constant devotion, industry and loyalty that has been such an important factor in the success of the company.” He also commented,
Someone has said: “Live each day so that you can look every damn man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.” This has always been the position of the company, and also of every man employed by the company, if he was satisfied with himself and sure he was doing right.
That motto appears to have been called a “Western Philosophy” and penned in Alaska at the end of the 19th century during the great Yukon Gold Rush. Seven months later, however, Scott was dead at just age 51 due to heart trouble and he was survived his widow and two children, though Luna Scott lived just five more years.
A biographical sketch in John Steven McGroarty’s 1921 history, Los Angeles From the Mountains to the Sea included fulsome praise for Scott’s business ability and being “strictly a legitimate [oil] operator.” The Scott heirs continued their part-ownership of Tres Hermanos as well as the La Merced property and other holdings. Being graduates of Stanford University, they endowed a law school professorship in memory of their parents and this still exists today.
There is talk within the Authority about continuing public access of the ranch as part of its evolving future planning, so we’ll look to share further Tres Hermanos Ranch history on the blog along with these developments.
Every time I drove by this area of rolling hills and grassy lands, I couldn’t help but admire the beautiful scenic drive. However, I also imagined the mountains eventually being covered by hundreds of houses or solar farms, a reality I know is inevitable. I sincerely hope the “Tres Ciudades Authority” will continue their efforts to preserve the beauty of the Tres Hermanos Ranch for as long as possible.