by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The Petrolia petroleum prospecting project pursued by Burdette Chandler and others in the area that later became the Olinda oil field in the northeastern corner of Orange County and which began in 1883 as he was simultaneously partnered with William R. Rowland at the Puente field just a few miles to the west yielded some heavy gravity crude just below the surface from wells sunk in Soquel Canyon, adjacent to today’s Chino Hills State Park.
Chandler, a resident of the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles who was also a member of the City Council for much of the Eighties, formed his namesake oil company with near neighbor George Chaffey and others and then worked with Walter S. Maxwell as attempts to dig deeper and get to the more valuable lighter grade oil continued.
One major use for the product was intended for street paving in Los Angeles, though, as 1887 dawned and the Angel City and environs were in the midst of the great boom while Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman was the newly sworn-in mayor, the 19 January edition of the Los Angeles Herald reported,
The fine aspahltum made [refined] at Petrolia is now being shipped to Europe instead of being used in paving the streets of Los Angeles. What is the reason that the people do not demand the paving of Spring street and Main street[?] This paving has been promised for weeks and months and years but only little patches have been laid after all the talk about the matter.
It is humiliating to think that with ad [sic] inexhaustible supply of asphaltum and a knowledge of the combination of that substance with other elements to make a strong and durable pavement, that the streets of Los Angeles are still unpaved.
The paper, which had a vested interest in what it called “Herald Canyon,” and which was likely Telegraph Canyon, next to Petrolia, asked what could be done to get this local work accomplished rather than have the brea, or tar, from that field exported and suggested that “the people seem to think the pavement is too cheap as it is half the price of stone,” though municipalities uniformly went with whatever cost less.
Three days later, the Herald reported that Wallace Hardison and Lyman Stewart, partners in Ventura County oil fields and soon to be founders of Union Oil Company, which became a major player in the state’s industry, had a well that was “showing up well” on its land leased from the Chandler firm.
It was added that drilling during daylight hours led to the fact that “in the morning fifteen barrels of oil are baled out” and an indication that “the well is well down in the great oil basin.” The same article also noted that a sixth well at the Puente field, where Rowland’s main partner then was Los Angeles pipe manufacturer William Lacy, was expected to be a success.
The 20 March edition of the paper briefly remarked that Chandler went to Petrolia “to show his vast asphaltum fields to St. Louis capitalists,” though it does not appear that anything tangible came from the tour in terms of investment by the Missouri men. The Herald of 7 May commented that California’s largest oil well was being drilled by Hardison and Stewart at Santa Paula, which is where Union was established, but that their Petrolia well was yielding five barrels of crude daily without pumping, while they had a well at the Rancho La Brea (near the tar pits) that produced some considerable amount of gas.
Yet, little was mentioned otherwise about Petrolia during that year. In fact, it was not until mid-March 1888 that something substantial regarding the oil field was reported when the Herald of the 14th noted that Maxwell sold, for $75,000, 300 acres to a group from San Francisco which formed the Petrolia Oil Company.
As Maxwell exited from the scene, Chandler was also apparently pulling back in a major way, as well, even as he applied, in May 1889, for a patent in that area for 31 acres known as the Robinson Petroleum Placer Mining Claim. Two months prior, the area became part of the new Orange County detached from Los Angeles County.
A brief biographical sketch of Chandler in a Boyle Heights feature as part of the opening of the Los Angeles Cable Railway in the 10 April 1889 edition of the Los Angeles Times included the statement that “he has been successful in the oil business, and last year he cleaned up over $40,000.” The 28 March issue of the Anaheim Gazette concisely noted that Chandler “is taking out large quantities of petroleum from his wells in Brea canyon,” though whether this was Petrolia at Soquel or other holdings in the nearby Brea Canyon are not known. The paper’s edition of 5 September reported that he “will soon begin boring for oil in his claims north of town” and “has great hopes of some day having a fine flow” as was the case at a well in Whittier, perhaps the Puente field, “which is paying a handsome revenue.”
Despite this positive reports, matters were worsening for Chandler as the great boom went bust. Delinquent tax listings in February 1889 showed the Petrolia Asphalt and Oil Company as delinquent on 280 acres, this appearing to be the aforementioned San Francisco firm, though whether he was directly involved or not it not known, it was indicative of problems producing profits from whatever petroleum was unearthed there. In June, Chandler sold half-interests in a lot in the area to three brothers for $5,000.
In November 1889, the councilmember was arrested and indicted on charges that he extorted the leaders of a “clock game” scheme for several hundred dollars after he lost $5,000 on bogus investments in such products as grain, pork and others. When he posted bail, one of his sureties was William H. Workman, who accompanied the chastened Chandler from court and remarked, “Burdett[e], what a sucker you have been.”
Chandler was acquitted early the following year and a second indictment against him dismissed, but also was sued by Maxwell for default on a note for $1,800, another example of his faltering finances, though the two amicably settled out of court. In June 1892, Maxwell sold at least some of his interests to Chandler for $600. The prior year, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which shipped some of Chandler’s Petrolia products from its Anaheim depot, sued him on a vendor’s lien involving some $3,000 in unpaid bills.
During the 1890s, several advertisements were taken out by Chandler selling his Petrolia-area lands, including at Brea Canyon and Puente, as well as machinery and equipment from his wells, reflective not only of his economic plight, but of the often difficult environment of that period, which included a national depression that burst forth in 1893 and several years of local drought.
The 5 February 1892 issue of the Los Angeles Express heard from Chandler, who a new partner named Fonda, and cheerily reported on progress at two Puente field wells, west of the highly successful wells of Rowland and Lacy, with one producing eight barrels a day with the crude used at the Whittier state school for troubled boys. Notably, Chandler told the paper that, years before, prospectors looking for coal in the Puente Hills sunk shafts in many locations and, even though they found trace oil indications, gave up their efforts. He concluded,
What is needed is capital. If those hills were in the East all the money necessary to develop the oil could be raised with [without?] difficulty, but it is not so in California. Los Angeles need never worry over the fuel problem. Just as soon as fuel is wanted it can be had right at our doors, the cleanest, cheapest fuel in existence except natural gas.
The Gazette of 7 April remarked that Chandler was in Anaheim and told it that “he will shortly commence operations in the oil regions north of town,” though exactly where was left unsaid. The Times of 7 June 1893 reported that some 600 acres of land in and around Soquel Canyon were leased, almost certainly from Chandler, with great hopes expressed for a successful outcome of the project.
Ever seeking for the big payoff, Chandler had petroleum prospecting projects in Boyle Heights, where he drilled a well for the Cudahy meatpacking company, and even secured a claim to drill in the bed of the adjacent Los Angeles River. In 1896-1897, he returned to Soquel and Brea canyons with new plans for seeking oil, with the Gazette of 24 September 1896 commenting,
Burdette Chandler, the well-known oil baron of Los Angeles, was in town on Monday, making arrangements for putting down several new oil wells on his lands at the mouth of Soquel canyon [which joins with Carbon Canyon near where a mobile home park is today in the Olinda Village community of Brea] . . . Mr. Chandler is considering the practicability of putting in a pipe line to this city . . . He also has an eye out for supplying the new [Los] Alamitos [beet] sugar mill with oil for fuel purposes.
In 1897, Edward L. Doheny who, with Charles Canfield, brought in the major oil field northwest of downtown Los Angeles with little funding and primitive equipment, brought in Orange County’s first oil well literally hundreds of yards to the northwest of that mouth of Soquel Canyon. As importantly, Doheny partnered with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad on his work in what was dubbed the Olinda oil field, as the move from coal to oil for fueling locomotives was in progress. It also happened that the first automobile appeared on Los Angeles streets that year, foreshadowing the future importance of gasoline for vehicles.
Chandler, however, could not cash in. In June 1899, he, George Chaffey and a third man sold 200 acres to Hardison and Stewart’s Union Oil Company. In September, he was sued by his own company for the recovery of $7,500 appropriated by him “by selling or otherwise disposing of land . . . in which the [firm] was interested.” Two months later, he transferred 100 acres in Brea Canyon to the oil company of that name.
While Chandler’s active efforts at Olinda/Petrolia/Soquel and Brea canyons were essentially over, he was again sued, regarding title to lands in that area, in June 1912, and, in January 1914, not long before his death at age 77, transferred to the federal government all of his interest in property there. In other areas of California, however, such as Santa Maria in northern Santa Barbara County and in the adjoining San Luis Obispo County, he had oil interests and he also advertised for sales of large amounts of acreage during the first years of the 20th century.
The name Petrolia largely vanished, as well, though, in 1915, State Senator George Bauer proposed a division of Orange County and called for a new one in the northern section, in which just 20,000 persons resided (though that was purportedly about the same number in the remaining portion), with Anaheim, Buena Park, Fullerton, Placentia, Yorba Linda, and Olinda to be part of the new “Petrolia County,” along with the Los Angeles County towns of Artesia, Norwalk and Whittier. Clearly, the idea was to keep oil tax revenues in this area!
Almost a quarter century later, Jim Sleeper, assessor of Orange County and an important chronicler of its early history, wrote about that topic for its 50th anniversary and commented that, with regard to the origins of oil there, “the early history of the old oil fields is indefinite as it dates back to 1880.”
He remarked that “the Brea field was discovered by Puente Oil company in the late seventies at about the same time Burdette Chandler discovered oil in this field; in later years this developed into a great field which has produced many million barrels of oil.” By Brea, Sleeper meant what started as Petrolia and then became Olinda, or Brea-Olinda,” while his identification of time was just a few years at variance from Chandler’s active work at Soquel Canyon starting in 1883.
The Orange County Register of 1 March 1964, the year that the Olinda Village community opened and, as the oil field was slowly diminishing while the Carbon Canyon Dam and nearly completed regional park were also transforming the landscape very near Chandler’s field of operations some eight decades before, ran a feature on the origin of place names in the county. For Olinda it remarked that it was “originally known as Petrolia,” though it added that the name was introduced in 1900, when it was actually a baker’s dozen of years before as noted in part one of this post.
Now, the Brea265 project is underway, with the decommissioning of some of the last Olinda field wells taking place (remarkably, Doheny’s Well #1 still pumps oil at the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail) as houses and other elements will replace them in upcoming years. Nearly 150 years after these early explorations took place, the history of Petrolia proves to be an instructive one regarding the origins of the oil history of Los Angeles and Orange counties, even if Burdette Chandler’s dreams of hitting it big there largely proved elusive.
It’s unfortunate that Burdette Chandler was unable to reap a profitable harvest from his years of prospecting – venturing across here and there, and from his numerous drilling rigs – sinking deep and shallow wells. Instead, he ultimately lost both his fortune and reputation. However, I still find him admirable for his unwavering ambition and persistent actions, despite the primitive technology and equipment available for oil prospecting and well drilling at the time. A man with foresight who fails in the attempt deserves more respect than a man with hindsight who feels complacent without ever trying.
Hi Larry, Chandler is an interesting figure in that he could certainly foresee the region’s oil future and often identified the right locations, including Puente and Petrolia, though some areas (Boyle Heights and the LA River bed) proved to be the wrong choices. Apparently he made some significant sums of money, if press accounts are correct, but also got into some financial trouble, including that “investment” which led to his indictment and trial. The word “speculator” often had very negative connotations to it, with some of those labeled this way being con (scam) artists, though Chandler may have been more of a speculator who took enormous risks and did not always make the best decisions. In this way, he could be an apt comparison to F.P.F. and Walter P. Temple and their own speculative enterprises in the 1870s and 1920s periods.