Pico No. 4 is one of the most important LA landmarks of them all. This unassuming bit of rusty pipe is the remnant of the first commercially successful oil well in CA, drilled in 1876 and producing oil for 114 years.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places (and designated a National Historic Landmark) on November 13, 1966

Gas prices are soaring. The Ukraine-Russia war is teaching us some hard lessons about reliance on foreign oil. And renewable energy is getting closer to fulfilling its massive potential – for a brief window of time just this past weekend, on April 30, 2022, California met 100% of its statewide energy needs from renewable sources. To put it simply, oil is unsexy right now, especially in California.  

But 150 years ago, oil was very sexy here. And as the first commercially successful oil well in the state, Pico Canyon’s Well No. 4 is one of the sexiest landmarks of all. All that’s left of the well right now is eight-ish feet of pipe, with a plaque mounted on a short stone pillar, standing guard next to it. That pipe represents the origin of the California oil economy, a huge milestone for the development of LA, California and the nation. So important, in fact, that Pico No. 4 was the first LA County site to be named a National Historic Landmark, and one of the first two added to the National Register of Historic Places, way back on November 13, 1966 – less than a month after the NRHP was established. For those of you keeping score, the other one added that day was the Andres/Romulo Pico Adobe, visit #19.

After oil was discovered in Titusville, PA in 1859, speculators began eyeing the undeveloped fields of California for drilling. Most of the focus was on Humboldt County in northern CA, but between 1865 and 1867 a mini “black gold rush” took place in the Pico Canyon area west of Newhall, with some 300 claims entered into the log books. 

According to an 1882 story in the LA Times, a Mexican hunter named Ramon Perea was tracking a wounded deer in the canyon in 1865, and found it lying next to a spring of water with an oily, green sheen on it. Later accounts claim that Perea gathered some of the oil in a canteen and brought it to the Mission San Fernando (or Rancho Camulos, according to some sources), where a Dr. Vincent Gelcich recognized it as petroleum, and formed a company to stake a claim on the area. Perea was offered an interest in the company, but apparently traded it for a small sum of money and a barrel of booze. 

Despite some early promise from such small springs and oil seepages in Pico Canyon, none of the claims resulted in major finds. In 1867, coal oil from the east started selling in San Francisco, at a cost much cheaper than the stuff being refined in California. And that was the end of the first CA oil boom. 

In the mid-1870s, three veterans of the Pennsylvania oil fields – Denton Cyrus Scott, Robert C. McPherson and John J. Baker – decided to give Pico Canyon another go. They leased a small refinery in nearby Lyons Station, founded a company called the Star Oil Works, and hired a guy named Charles Mentry (another PA oilman) to start drilling in 1875. His first well, Pico No. 1, hit oil at 120 feet below ground, and started pumping about 12 barrels a day – by no means a “gusher,” but more productive than any well in California so far. Mentry hit oil with his next two wells, Pico No. 2 and 3. It was promising enough that the rechristened California Star Oil Works Co. bought the Lyons Station refinery outright, hired Titusville refiner John A. Scott to operate it, and convinced some San Francisco investors to supply them with the resources needed to keep drilling Pico Canyon.

Mentry began the fateful drilling of Pico No. 4 in July of 1876. On September 26, he literally hit paydirt at 370 feet, when oil started flowing at a rate of 25-30 barrels a day. He kept at it, and in November of 1877, he finally got his gusher. When the drill pierced 560 feet below ground, a fountain of oil started spurting up to the top of Mentry’s 65-foot oil derrick, and from then on the well was pumping a spectacular 70 barrels daily. 

The operation was so successful that a larger refinery, known as the Pioneer Refinery (Etan Does LA visit #99), was constructed right on the newly finished Southern Pacific railroad line on the western edge of Newhall. In 1879 Mentry laid California’s first oil pipeline, a seven-mile-long iron pipe stretching between Pico No. 4 to the new refinery; you can still see the pipe today. 

The success of Pico No. 4 set off another oil boom in California that extended into the new century, amplified by discoveries of oil underneath downtown LA in 1890, and Kern River to the north in 1899. By 1900, California was pumping some 4 million barrels annually, and by 1920 it had exploded to 77 million barrels. For the first few decades of the 20th century, California and Oklahoma regularly vied for status as the #1 oil-producing state in the US.

In the meantime, Pico No. 4 continued to produce. Its owner California Star Oil was acquired by Standard Oil in 1901, which changed its name to Chevron in 1977; the little derrick that could kept on chugging until 1990, when it was finally capped. By that time most of the Pico Canyon oil had been depleted, and Pico No. 4 was pumping just one barrel a day. It was a quiet end to the well’s record-setting 114 years in service. 

If you’re headed through Pico Canyon to see the well, you’ll pass by the remnants of Mentryville (see post #11), the pioneer town that Charles Mentry built in the canyon to house the workers at the oil field. It was abandoned in the 1930s, and by the ‘60s had turned into a ghost town, populated only by a caretaker and his family living in Mentry’s old 13-room house. Mentryville is now run by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as a historic park; they’ve restored the roads and old buildings, but kept a lot of the old rusty equipment that lends the canyon its authentic, oily character. 

Recommended Reading

+Pico Canyon, Well No. 4’s National Historic Landmark nomination form @ NRHP website

+Pico Canyon | Mentryville (Santa Clarita Valley History website) 

+Brief History of Oil Development in Pico Canyon (elsmerecanyon.com)

+CSO 4 Area (or Pico Springs) (elsmerecanyon.com)

+Ramon Perea: A Forgotten Name at Pico (Santa Clarita Valley History website)

+Mapping the long history of oil drilling in LA (Curbed LA, 2019)