Mentryville Park

Overview

There are many reasons why California is what it is today – but you can argue that more than anything, two natural resources were instrumental in building the region and even making the land United States territory: gold and oil. Those who bemoan Southern California’s lack of preserved history need look no further than present-day Santa Clarita. To its east in Placerita Canyon, California’s first gold was discovered in 1842 – a full six years before the better known strike at Sutter’s Mill. And here in Pico Canyon – less than 10 miles from Placerita as the crow flies – sits the site of California’s first commercially viable oil well. Alex Mentry – Photo donated by Chevron to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy The region had been explored for oil before (nearby Towsley Canyon has its own oil producing history), but it took a 30-year old French immigrant named Charles Alexander Mentrier (better known as Alex Mentry) to drill the 617-foot deep well known as Pico Number 4. When it was turned on for Pennsylvania oil man Demetrius G. Scofield’s California Star Oil Company on September 26, 1876, it struck a gusher and would continue producing oil until the year 1990, making it the longest operating oil well in the world. After the strike, up to a hundred families moved into the canyon in a settlement that became known as Mentryville. A schoolhouse went up in 1885, Mentry and his family lived in a 13-room mansion, and this boomtown was the first in the Santa Clarita Valley to have gas lighting. The town also had a bakery, social hall, blacksmith shop, machine shop, and boarding houses – as well as a gas-lit tennis court and main road paved with local asphalt. Apparently there were no saloons, though – Mentry supposedly prohibited both drinking alcohol and the use of foul language in his boomtown. At its height, Mentryville had 74 oil wells and produced 100,000 barrels of oil a year, but declining output and Mentry’s death in 1900 saw most of the workers and their families move on to other projects. In the 1930s, mo

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