Boom Shelters : Simple Homes Built During Brea’s Oil Production Heyday Now Tucked Among Modern Dwellings
The closest Randy Foster gets to oil is when he takes his Mercedes to the mechanic. But the house Foster and his family live in on South Orange Avenue is as steeped in oil history as the derrick-dotted hills and canyons to the north and east of this former boom town.
The Fosters’ house, a classic Craftsman-style cottage, was built in 1922 on the old Graham-Loftus oil lease, part of which is now the Birch Hills Golf Course on Imperial Highway. The house was one of hundreds built on oil-lease properties for workers and their families during the heyday of Brea’s oil production in the first decades of the century.
Most of these houses, which the oil companies rented to workers for as little as $12 a month, were simple wood-frame homes. Over the years, the vast majority were razed by the oil companies as workers built their own homes in the growing city.
But an unknown number of the houses, sold at nominal cost to the workers, were moved into Brea. Those that survive are now tucked among a mixture of ‘30s Spanish-style homes, ‘50s ranch-style houses and ‘80s townhouses.
Randy and Adele Foster’s home was moved to its present location about 1927. When they bought it in 1978 for $58,000 it had gone through several owners and was, said Foster, “in pretty bad shape.”
Indeed, the floors squeaked so badly, said Foster, “we could actually hear the cat coming down the hallway at night.”
About five years ago the couple decided they wanted to move into a more modern house, but after “looking and looking,” said Foster, 44, “we kept on coming back to this old place because of its character and charm.”
Few of the former oil-lease houses in Brea are as large or as architecturally appealing as the Fosters’ home, which was included on a recent home tour marking the city’s 75th anniversary of its incorporation.
“There wasn’t an awful lot of expense or lavish architecture to them, therefore many have fallen victim to development over the years,” said Jack Smith of the Brea Historical Society, adding that many also were on land that was later rezoned for multiple-family dwellings.
Because many of the former oil-lease homes are not energy-efficient or have deteriorating wiring and plumbing, Smith said, “it’s just a very expensive restoration project for very simple architecture and high maintenance due to wood-frame windows and wood siding.”
The oil lease houses began cropping up soon after the area’s first big oil strike at the Puente field northwest of Brea in 1884.
By the 1890s, there were up to 30 different oil companies operating in the Brea-Olinda area. Prominent among them was Union Oil Co. of California, which owned much of the land that later became the city of Brea, according to Teresa Hampson, who is writing a history of the community, “Brea: Celebrating 75 Years,” for the historical society.
By the turn of the century the largest congregation of oil-lease houses in the area was the oil community of Olinda northeast of Brea at the entrance to Carbon Canyon.
Drilling started in Olinda in 1887, and there were eight large oil leases, Hampson said, including Chanslor-Canfield Midway, Olinda Crude, Shell, Columbia, Stearns, Associated, Santa Fe and Union.
The site of the vanished oil-boom community, which later became part of Brea, is now Carbon Canyon Regional Park.
But during its heyday in the early years of the century it was home to 3,000 oil workers and their families, and it boasted a general store, livery stable, barbershop, church, school and recreation hall--and about 700 board-and-battan houses.
“They were all practically the same,” recalls Brea resident Louise Bleininger, 87. “They were just what we called sideboard houses. They were nice and comfortable. They had a front porch and a back porch. Generally, the people enclosed the back porch and sometimes used it as a sleeping porch.”
Bleininger was 3 years old in 1907 when she and her parents moved to Olinda, on the old Santa Fe Oil lease. Her father worked first as a pumper, then became the storekeeper in the oil company’s supply house.
In those early days, she recalled, people generally went into Fullerton or Anaheim on Saturday nights.
“We didn’t go that much because my mother liked to go into Los Angeles,” she said, recalling that they would walk 3 miles to where Imperial Highway now runs and catch a Pacific Electric “red car” at 6:30 in the morning; they’d return home about 3:30 in the afternoon. “Generally, we’d go up to Los Angeles to get school clothes and shoes.”
Bleininger lived in her parents’ home until she married her oil worker husband, Andrew, in 1929. After living in Bakersfield for five years, the couple returned to Olinda in 1934 and rented an oil-lease house for $16 a month.
And, the rent included water, lights and gas.
On weekends, “we generally just went over to Anaheim and would go shopping or go to the picture show.” On Sundays they’d often drive to what is now Irvine Regional Park for picnics.
By the 1940s, most oil workers were no longer living on the oil leases. Usually, Bleininger said, “they just tore the houses down. People had moved to Brea, Anaheim, Fullerton. There wasn’t very much out there any more, and these places were building up, and people were just moving out and driving out there to work.”
Bleininger, whose family moved into a new home in Brea in 1955, said she never felt a sense of isolation living on an oil lease and saw no drawbacks.
“I always enjoyed it,” she said. “It seemed like everybody knew each other. It isn’t like now, where you don’t even know your neighbor. If somebody got sick there was always somebody to help out.”
Smith of the Brea Historical Society, who grew up on an oil lease in Olinda in the ‘40s and ‘50s, agrees.
“It was a great place to grow up,” said Smith, 47, who’s now a Brea building inspector. “I always miss the ground-squirrel hunting after school and in the evenings.”
The one drawback to living there was the noise of the oil wells. Smith said visitors seldom spent the night. At the time, wells were operated by noisy one-cylinder gasoline engines called “hit and miss” engines because they fired irregularly.
“It sounded like a 12-gauge shot gun going off,” said Smith.
But residents were used to the noise and didn’t pay it any mind, he said.
In fact, Helen Wood recalls living in an oil-lease house in Olinda during the ‘30s and ‘40s as “peaceful.”
“It was beautiful out there,” said Wood, 86, whose late husband, Perry, was an oil field mechanic working for Shell Oil in Long Beach when he was transferred to the Olinda fields in 1937.
“My friends said, ‘You won’t like it out there,’ but I just loved it,” said Wood. “I had a big garden and everything: beautiful trees--great big umbrella trees they called them--right in front of our house. We had everything out there--chickens, rabbits, a goat. . . .”
The Woods, who raised two sons in Olinda, rented a three-bedroom house for $15 a month.
“It was little frame house,” she said. “Nothing fancy about it.”
In 1950, another family on the Shell lease bought the house the Woods lived in and the Woods bought a larger house next door that the manager had been living in: a simple wood-frame house with three bedrooms and a wooden front porch.
Wood, who still lives in the house, was reluctant to reveal how much she and her late husband paid for it.
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said with a sly grin. “You’d be amazed. They said we could pay any price.” Later, she relented, saying, “It was $25 for the house and we went down to Stanton and got the mover.”
Wood said her two sons recently took her out for a Sunday drive and they pointed out where their old house used to stand. She often reminisces about those days living on the oil lease. “That’s all I have to do now,” she said.
Every year in August, former Olinda residents meet to do the same thing at an old-timers picnic in Carbon Canyon Regional Park.
But as Bleininger said: “It’s being run by the younger ones now.”
“Of course,” she added with a laugh, “they’re not that young either. They’re in their 60s and 70s. But they grew up there and remember a lot of things, too.”
