Oil in a Day’s Work : The Boom May Be Over, but a Few Wells Pump On

Among the viridescent, rolling hills of George Lechler’s ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley, a steady whine rises above the intermittent lowing of cattle.

It’s the whine of oil drills, similar to the hundreds that used to crowd the valley. But now, as in other parts of the region, they are fading to a whimper.

Oil was a driving force from the 1940s through the 1960s, when speculators found the Santa Clarita Valley chock-full of fertile fields. Since then, however, fields have turned barren, while others tease prospectors with oil too costly to secure and the days of a booming oil economy have drifted into history.

Lechler remains one of few individuals who still own oil wells in the valley. Larger petroleum companies are selling their stakes in the area.

Lechler’s grandfather, after whom he was named, came to the area from Pennsylvania in 1875 and made a good living by raising cattle and honeybees. Today, Lechler continues to do so. But in between, there was the oil.

“The field now is marginal,” said the 91-year-old rancher, who leased his land to oil companies that drilled more than 50 wells. “It’s costing a lot to produce oil nowadays.”

But in days gone by, the valley hummed with people searching for an underground river of black.

“There was a point where near everyone seemed to have an oil well,” said Lyle Snow, president of Commander Oil, a family company with some oil interests in Valencia but mostly in Kern and Ventura counties.

The boom days for Lechler began in 1942, when a small well struck what became the Oak Canyon oil field, about seven miles west of the Golden State Freeway near Val Verde. The one well produced more than 100 barrels a day, and after that discovery, oil companies beat a path to Lechler’s door to get a lease on his land.

“It was real surprising to me, because they had drilled an awful lot of dry wells, you know,” said Lechler, standing in front of the 12-foot well that started the surge but has since fallen silent.

“At the time, we were making a lot of money from the bees,” said Lechler, who at one point kept 2,200 colonies of the honey and money makers. “The fact is, we were kind of disappointed that they found oil, because we liked our privacy.”

Lechler continues to lease his land to an oil company, but the production is only a fraction of what it used to be. And of the seven wells that Lechler himself owns, only one still chugs away.

“I’m just happy to be lucky to have this piece of ground when oil was discovered here,” he said.

Lechler was by no means alone in his good fortune. Oil men had been groping around the canyons of the area since 1876, when the first commercially successful oil well west of Pennsylvania was built several miles south of Lechler’s ranch in Pico Canyon.

In the same year, the Pioneer Oil Refinery, the oldest extant refinery in the world, was built alongside railroad tracks that now carry the Metrolink trains through Santa Clarita. The landmark has long been out of operation but remains standing.

It is believed that American Indians first discovered oil in the valley hundreds of years before European settlers arrived, according to “Pico Canyon Chronicles,” written by local historian Gerald Reynolds. The Indians skimmed the sticky, tar-like substance into waterproof baskets and believed that the crude oil had medicinal value in relieving muscle aches and arthritis.

In the mid-1800s, Mexican Gen. Andreas Pico collected oil from natural seeps in Pico Canyon and distilled it to be burned in lamps.

After a series of similar surface discoveries by other Mexican settlers, leases were taken out by Pennsylvania oilmen who had headed out West.

In one part of Pico Canyon, an oil town of about 100 families sprung up about 1880, with homes built of redwood and heated and lit by nearby gas wells, according to Reynolds.

The cluster of homes scattered among the wells became known as Mentryville, with several boarding houses and a tent city dotting the landscape for newcomers.

Over time, though, as the oil began to dry up, the town did too.

“As guys moved out, they tore their houses down and took them with them,” Frenchy Lagasse said. He and his wife, Carol, are the last residents of what was Mentryville. All that remains are a handful of buildings, including a house, a barn and a school that the couple restored.

Like Lechler’s forefathers, those who settled the area before the discovery of oil benefited handsomely from their windfall.

The Newhall Land & Farming Co., which owned a large chunk of the Santa Clarita Valley and now develops the Valencia master-planned community, made slim profits during the Depression by raising cattle and leasing property to farmers through the mid-1930s.

Oil companies made halfhearted attempts to explore the Newhall land before, but not much had come of it, according to “A California Legend,” a history of the Newhall company written by Ruth Waldo Newhall. Heads of the Newhall firm “believed that oil drilling on the ranch was a futile exercise.”

In 1936, however, an oil company leasing a part of the Newhall ranch hit pay dirt, and “the hard days were over,” Newhall wrote, as oil became the company’s primary source of income.

“For quite a time, from the 1930s to ‘50s, oil was quite a profitable part of our company,” said Marlee Laufer, a Newhall Land spokeswoman. “It definitely helped us through some of the early days, particularly through the Depression.”

The valley bustled with oil workers who drilled more than 500 wells in the region over the years.

“Oil in the West really started here,” said Dick Eckhart, a geologist who worked for Sun Oil in the early 1950s. “Back then, if you went to the Blue Moon restaurant--which used to be called Tip’s--at noon, you could hardly get in, there were so many oil guys in overalls.”

The Blue Moon, just north of Magic Mountain, now serves a luncheon clientele wearing mostly navy blue power suits.

“Most of the big oil here was found, and found many years ago,” said Eckhart, who now works as an independent geologist in Santa Clarita. “There’s not a whole lot of activity anymore.”

In the past five years, Chevron USA, successor to California Star Oil--which founded the first commercially successful well in the West--and owner of the Pioneer Oil Refinery, plugged up about 100 oil wells in the Santa Clarita Valley, divesting themselves of their oil interests here.

The company pulled out of the valley not only because the oil had been depleted, but because it was getting too costly to draw it out.

“We were losing money, because there wasn’t enough being produced in these wells,” said Pat Curvin, senior real estate representative for Chevron. Each well barely pumped 10 barrels a day.

Now, the company is in the real estate business, selling off its 5,500 acres of once oil-rich land to any takers, Curvin said.

That hasn’t made many friends out of Santa Clarita residents, since Chevron last year sold property to the BKK Corp., which now wants to use the area in Elsmere Canyon for a landfill.

“They wanted to buy it, and no one else did,” Curvin said.

Local groups fear a landfill will have a detrimental effect on the environment and living standards of the area.

Chevron may have called it quits, but a few die-hard oil prospectors persist.

Last year, a petroleum consortium spent about $7 million digging an oil well three miles into the Santa Susana Mountains on a lease from Chevron, which did not think much of the idea and did not invest any money in the project. The well, located in Towsley Canyon just west of Santa Clarita, has turned out to be marginal, producing oil mixed with too much water to be of any value. The consortium shut the rig down.

On the east side of Santa Clarita in Placerita Canyon, however, Arco and Virginia-based Applied Energy Services are still pumping strong and plan on continuing for at least two more decades.

“We are committed to the field here, and we’re investing money into it,” said Paul Langland, a director of external affairs at Arco.

Arco and AES have 210 wells in production in Placerita Canyon between them and both use steam from a cogeneration plant to generate electricity and to extract more oil from the ground.

The field, which produces about 3,000 barrels of oil a day, is one of two remaining Arco oil drilling ventures in Southern California, Langland said.

“Basically, it’s not a small field,” said Langland of the deposits first discovered in 1948. “But it’s not a gigantic field by any means.”

Langland attributed the longevity of the field to, in part, enhanced recovery techniques developed by engineers, but he added that increased regulations are keeping petroleum producers from getting all the oil out of the ground.

“There are still quite a few prospects in the Santa Clarita Valley that, as oil men, we would like to drill,” Langland said. “But as a person that’s familiar with the regulations that we have and the planning and procedures we need to go through to get a permit, it just isn’t feasible or economical to go forward with these sorts of things.

“We’re putting our money in overseas projects, where it’s a little bit easier to get approvals to get the well drilled and to find a market to sell the oil.”

Indeed, Santa Clarita officials vigorously--and unsuccessfully--fought the company’s plans to launch the cogeneration plant.

Meanwhile, Lechler envisions a new, more prosperous well on his property, one that would go thousands of feet deeper than the current ones.

“I won’t be here, though,” the rancher said. “This will be for the kids.”