Tres Hermanos Ranch Tour Postview: The Puente Oil Company and its Chino Connection, 1881-1896

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

This morning, the Tres Hermanos Ranch of some 2,500 acres owned by the City of Industry and located in the cities of Chino Hills and Diamond Bar was made available to the public with a third set of guided tours consisting of three stops where some 75 visitors learned about the ranch’s natural and human history from James Cramsie of CNC Engineering, Cal Poly Pomona Professor Emeritus Dan Hostetler and yours truly with John Arnold, of the family who leased the land for some 60 years, also at my stop to share some of that history, as well.

For this second stop focusing on the cultural history of Tres Hermanos, some background of those “three brothers,” whose bond was business not blood, was given including that of Los Angeles Times publisher and real estate baron Harry Chandler, oil producer William B. Scott, and former Los Angeles County Sheriff and oil figure William R. Rowland, whose father John was the long time co-owner, with William Workman, of the nearby Rancho La Puente.

A post here after the second set of tours, held last June, went into some of the history of Scott and we’ll look, after the next cycle, to share some of the story of Chandler, while, as a “postview” to today’s visit, we’ll get into Rowland and his Puente Oil Company, which directly had ties to the ranch in terms of a pipeline built through Tres Hermanos to a refinery in Chino. Before getting into that, let’s do a short recap of Rowland’s early years.

He was born on 11 November 1846 on the Rancho La Puente, being the youngest child of John Rowland and Encarnación Martínez, and was raised on the vast domain that encompassed nearly 25,000 acres. The first family home, an adobe, was located on the north side of San José Creek, a short distance east of the Workman House, but William’s mother died when he was just about five years old.

After his father married Charlotte Gray, a resident of the newly established town of El Monte, in 1852, it was decided to build a new brick dwelling on the south side of the creek. Completed in 1855 and apparently the oldest surviving brick building in southern California, the Rowland House is now owned by the La Puente Valley Historical Society and is now open once a month for tours after more than three decades of largely being closed.

William learned all the aspects of ranch life in his childhood, though he received what could be considered a high school education at Santa Clara College, now the University of Santa Clara, near San José. At just 19, he was appointed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to be a Judge of the Plains, a position of importance in enforcing ordinances and laws pertaining to the operation of ranches, especially at roundups of cattle and horses.

When he was still 22, he ran for Sheriff and, while he lost that first campaign in 1869, he succeeded in the next election two years later and served two terms from 1871 to 1875. Imagine a 24 year-old winning any major political office at the county level today! Rowland, who performed a variety of functions, including sheriff’s sales of foreclosed real estate and tax collection, was best known during that first stint for his hunt and capture of the notorious bandido, Tiburcio Vásquez, in spring 1874.

Rowland ended his first stint as sheriff and took possession of a portion of La Puente left to him after his father’s October 1873 death, engaging in farming and ranching for several years. In 1880, he secured election to a third term as sheriff and served a single two-year term, during which time, Burdette Chandler, a recent arrival in Los Angeles with experience in oil prospecting in Pennsylvania, where the American oil industry was born, partnered with Rowland in drilling on the latter’s La Puente land. Apparently, John Rowland noticed oil seepages at the top of the Puente Hills, but nothing was done for some forty years.

Chandler drilled a couple of wells in the early 1880s and some crude was extracted, but after a few years, he sold out and took up work in Soquel Canyon, southeast of the Puente property in northeast Orange County, in an area he dubbed Petrolia. Rowland then took on pipe manufacturer William Lacy as a partner and the two hired William E. Youle, who was previously profiled here. With his proficiency on full display, Youle had a perfect record on more than a dozen wells during much of the decade and launched the region’s first successful oil field.

The Los Angeles Herald of 18 December 1885 reported,

The oil from the new well of Messrs. Rowland and Lacy, in the Puente hills, is a fine quality of lubricating oil . . . and well adapted to use as fuel in furnaces and stoves. Such a well as these gentlemen have secured is a priceless treasure to the country. It gives forth wealth daily without impoverishing the soil, and will doubtlessly continue to do so after the present generation has been gathered to its fathers. What is needed now is to have 1000 wells sunk in the oil basin of Los Angeles and Ventura counties . . . the oil is here and must be taken out.

Rowland and Lacy erected three large storage tanks in the field, which was just east of where Harbor Boulevard coming north from Orange County turns into Fullerton Road in Los Angeles County, and ran a pipe line to the Southern Pacific railroad track to the north for shipment to refiners. It was early planned for the proprietors to build their own pipeline to Los Angeles and then to the new town of Puente, but this project was not immediately realized.

Just about a year later, the paper quoted Griffith J. Griffith, who later achieved notoriety for nearly killing his wife Christina Mesmer at a Santa Monica hotel in an alcoholic fit and then sought redemption after serving time at San Quentin including the donation of some 3,000 acres for a park bearing his name in Los Angeles. Visiting the Puente field, Griffith, who apparently had some knowledge of the Pennsylvania oil region, was surprised to see the scale and scope of the work undertaken by Rowland and Lacy and told the Herald that “there is every reason to believe that the [oil] industry will be classed among the foremost of this coast within a reasonable time.”

The Herald of 30 January 1887, as the famed Boom of the Eighties was in full ferment in greater Los Angeles, observed that Youle brought in the sixth successful well in succession and touted the crude’s use for fuel for manufacturing and for making gas used in lighting and heating. It praised Rowland and Lacy for their enterprise and initiative and the paper continued that “the oil and gas supply from the earth is greater in this county than in any other part of the world” and needed to be extracted as “an additional source of the wonderous wealth of Los Angeles county which only needs capital and enterprise to develop it.”

A lengthy feature in the 16 May 1889 edition of the paper included Rowland telling a reporter that, when the first well produced all of 10 to 12 barrels per day,

That was more than I expected. I thought that if we could get out a wagon load of oil a day it would be a great thing; and at first I used to drive the wagon myself, in order to be sure the oil should not be spilled.

After a short time, however, as the Youle-drilled wells yielded their increasing volumes of product, Rowland did not have to worry about handling the transport as he and Lacy raked in the proceeds in correspondingly greater amounts. The article went into detail about the process of pumping the crude into tanks and then through the pipes down to the railroad station at Puente, where 150 barrels daily were loaded into a car and taken to the Angel City for processing.

Notably, the wells on the north face of the hills produced better than those on the opposite side and it was remarked that “the wells seem to be inexhaustible” and, with prices at $2 per barrel for fuel and $5 for lubrication and coating pipes made by Lacy, it was thought that revenues of $5,000 a day were not inconceivable. It was added that the proprietors owned 5,000 acres “stretching from the present wells to the Brea Cañon,” this being the original name for what is now Tonner Canyon, which runs north from Brea into Tres Hermanos Ranch, “on the north side of the hills, eight miles away.”

With typical overenthusiasm, the Herald claimed that the assumed oil belt of the Puente field, said to be a mile wide and eight miles long, was one in which “lie untold millions of money” while “here is one of the richest supplies of fuel in the world, which for a generation will furnish Los Angeles city with heat and power.” But, within a few decades, the region broadly would include those immense reserves of fossil fuels that powered incredible growth and, of course, made multi-millionaires of oil promoters and producers.

Notably, the article concluded that the Puente field and surrounding areas had other value, such as the historic grazing of cattle and sheep, potential for hog-raising (which did take place in the area near Tres Hermanos not long after, such as at the Diamond Bar Ranch), and roads, including one “from Punente [sic] past the wells and across La Habra rancho, to join with Orangethorpe avenue, and then reach Anaheim,” this became the Anaheim-Puente Road, the aforementioned Harbor Boulevard/Fullerton Road corridor linked to Azusa Avenue to the north. There was also mention of the Southern Pacific Railroad possibly crossing the Puente Hills from Whittier towards Pomona, though this never happened (neither, much later, did a proposed Highway 39 Freeway to go through the hills!)

Earlier in 1889, as the great boom (which took place when William H. Workman was mayor of Los Angeles) went bust, there were rumors that a British syndicate was offering $700,000 to Rowland and Lacy for the Puente field. Not only did the two not sell, they incorporated the Puente Oil Company in 1892 and followed two years with the Puente Oil Pipe Line Company as they again pursued the idea of building a refinery with a pipeline (built by Lacy’s manufacturing firm) to run either to Los Angeles or to Puente.

The Herald of 10 October 1893 also pointed out that the Rowland and Lacy Land and Petroleum Company controlled “a principal part of the Rincon de la Bera [Brea] ranch and several thousand acres in the vicinity,” meaning east of the Puente field towards Brea Canyon and out toward what became Tres Hermanos Ranch. While it was added that “this property has not been explored for oil,” there were seepages from springs and “they expect to commence operations very soon.”

Even though a major depression erupted in 1893, the oil industry got another major boost when, during that period, Charles Canfield and Edward L. Doheny, with minimal investment and primitive drilling material, brought in the first well in the Los Angeles Oil Field. There was discussion of the possibility of further development tied to these two fields and, in short order, it was realized that, with operations in the Puente Hills north and east of Whittier and, in 1897, Doheny’s opening of the Olinda (Fullerton) Oil Field east of Puente, there was a definable belt trending southeast from the Angel City into north Orange County.

In its New Year 1895 edition, the Herald recorded that there were nearly three dozen wells producing up to 800 barrels daily in the Rowland and Lacy enterprise on 700 acres, with the seven-mile pipeline to Puente leading to storage tanks with a capacity of 25,000 barrels. The next big project, however, was to finally complete a refinery. While future crude transport by pipelines went west and south to the area between Los Angeles and the harbor that, with the Free Harbor Fight of the Nineties brought increasing federal appropriations for its development, made refineries there a certainty, Puente Oil decided to push eastward.

During the peak of the Boom of the Eighties, Richard Gird, owner of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, which partially included what became Tres Hermanos, formed the town of Chino. A key economic driver of the town in its early days was a huge investment in sugar beet growing and the production of sugar and, for fuel for the establishment, Puente Oil decided to construct its refinery there. By late 1895, ten acres were purchased at the south end of the town and the works constructed.

It seems very likely that the company’s pipeline went along the Puente Hills, crossed what is now Brea Canyon and then into the Chino Hills, including through the future Tres Hermanos Ranch before terminating at the new refinery in Chino. Rowland, naturally, would have been well acquainted with that property, which was long considered part of an expanded Rancho Los Nogales, and could see its potential for other uses very familiar to him from his younger days on the La Puente ranch.

The Puente Oil refinery came on line in March 1896, representing another major step for the firm. Seven years later, Rowland joined forces with Scott, whose Columbia firm was founded in 1898 thanks to his connections by marriage to the Hardison and Stewart partnership that was the Union Oil Company. The 1903 merger of Columbia and Puente significantly enhanced resources and another merger with two additional firms not quite a decade later brought Chandler into the enterprise, along with real estate and transportation figure Moses H. Sherman.

It was no surprise, then, that, at the end of 1914, the “three brothers” acquired the land that became Tres Hermanos Ranch and launched the Rowland Cattle Company, which raised cattle for the local beef market, on 10,000 acres including much of Brea Canyon and the Puente Hills east of the oil tract. It was oil that largely provided the bond between Chandler, Rowland and Scott and that vital product that brought about the creation of Tres Hermanos.

As noted above, we’ll look to get into some of Chandler’s remarkable history after the next set of Tres Hermanos tours—for future announcements, be sure to check the Conservation Authority website.