Land Deal Opens Window on Historic Ghost Town

More than a century after Mentryville was started, it is a forgotten town, a landlocked Atlantis that rose and sank on the slippery heels of a precarious industry.

Oil gave birth to Mentryville, but the declining flow of the emerald green petroleum that oozed freely from the rugged hills just west of what is now Santa Clarita foretold its inevitable death.

Since 1932, it has been a virtual ghost town.

But now that Chevron Corp. has reached an agreement with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to sell 3,000 acres of parkland--with Mentryville at its center--the public will once again be able to walk paths that have been desolate since the Depression.

The one-room Felton School--where classes were last held in 1932--several cottages and the two-story home of Alex Mentry, for whom the town was named, still stand as monuments to an often ignored chapter of California history.

“It’s important for the public to see,” said Carol Rock, president of the Santa Clarita Historical Society. “Unless we keep showing them, they are going to forget.”

Few remember Mentryville or Mentry. But his 1876 oil strike altered the region’s economy forever. All eyes turned to tiny Mentryville to power the machines of the dawning mechanical age.

Mentry soon was treated like royalty in a region where hope was more plentiful than oil.

“He was a brilliant man,” said Carol Lagasse, who, with her husband, Frenchy, has spent decades working to preserve the historic buildings of the town, including Mentry’s mansion.

Using an old railroad axle for a drill, Mentry improvised a derrick that struck oil in dusty Pico Canyon, about eight miles from present-day Santa Clarita. But local Native Americans had known for centuries that the canyon was full of oil.

They had used the green liquid--so clear, one booster said, that a newspaper could be read through it--to waterproof houses and to ease arthritic joints. Even Gen. Andres Pico--for whom the canyon is named--sent servants from his San Fernando Valley rancho to collect asphalt from the puddles.

Mentry’s strike, though, was the first to make oil drilling a profitable venture west of Pennsylvania. Much of that success was due to California Star Oil No. 4, a well spudded Sept. 26, 1876, that continued to produce oil for 114 years.

When it was shut down in 1990, CSO No. 4--now a state and national historical landmark--had become the oldest continuously pumping well in the world. In fact, the well outlasted the community by almost 50 years.

Since 1966, the sole residents of Mentryville have been 72-year-old Frenchy Lagasse and his wife of 47 years, Carol. Together, the couple have served as its caretakers, living in Mentry’s old house. Frenchy Lagasse’s rough hands and the couple’s own money have restored what remains of the town.

The Northridge earthquake undid much of their work, rendering the 13-room Victorian unlivable. He and his wife now live in Lebec and keep an RV in front of the Mentry house for occasional stays. They hope that the state will restore the home as well as the other buildings scattered along the canyon floor.

Rorie Skei, a division chief for the conservancy, said she would like to fix up the town and perhaps turn it into a visitors center for the surrounding parkland. Skei said the conservancy is working with the city of Santa Clarita to develop plans for the site.

The Lagasses, however, hope that the number of visitors allowed will be controlled.

“That’s why we want to stay here because we want to make sure it is done as it should be,” Frenchy Lagasse said.

Mentry, for one, knew how things should be done. A French immigrant who came to the United States when he was 7, he earned a reputation as a mechanical genius after drilling 42 successful wells in the oil fields of Pennsylvania.

Just the sort of man Demetrius Scofield, head of the fledgling California Star Oil Works, wanted to run the drilling operation that had begun in what was then called Pico Springs. Within months of his arrival at Pico Springs, Mentry increased the output of the wells until they actually made money.

A town sprang up almost immediately as experienced oilmen and their families came in search of work. Families lived in prefabricated redwood shacks that moved with them from place to place.

“When the people moved away, they tore down their houses and took it with them,” Frenchy Lagasse said.

Single men lived in tent cities and in a boardinghouse, which was usually packed.

“During one period when the canyon was the busiest, there were 75 boarders, two cooks, a meat cook and three waitresses,” Ruth Saunders Albright, whose mother ran the operation, wrote in a newspaper account.

Before Mentry’s death in 1900, his house--called the Big House by workers--was the gateway to the town that bore his name. The steps in front served as court for Judge John F. Powell and were the landing for the stagecoach that arrived twice daily from Newhall.

“Old Mentryville was not much different from hundreds of other Western mining towns, full of hard work, dust, sweat, occasional drama and lots of long, boring hours,” Santa Clarita historian Jerry Reynolds wrote.

Yet California historian Roger McGrath said oil communities such as Mentryville did differ slightly from the boom towns that sprang up around gold and silver strikes. Oil towns, he said, tended to be company towns, where most aspects of life were controlled by the conglomerate that ran the well.

Those who came to oil towns such as Mentryville tended to be veteran workers whose skills were honed in the petroleum-rich fields of Pennsylvania. Many brought families with them, so diversions leaned toward tennis and croquet rather than drinking and playing cards. Mining towns tended to be more rowdy, more entrepreneurial.

For many years, Mentryville was nothing more than a jumble of shacks amid a forest of oil derricks. Supplies were carted up from Newhall and children were sent to school in San Fernando. In 1885, the one-room Felton School--named after Sen. Charles Felton--opened its doors.

Over time, the wells slowed down. One by one, the derricks were dismantled and their parts shipped to new fields. The men and their families went with them, following strikes in the San Joaquin Valley or even heading back to Pennsylvania.

California Star Oil Works was swallowed by ever bigger corporations as the oil business in the West turned to big business. Standard Oil absorbed Mentry and Scofield’s company in 1900. Standard Oil of California eventually became Chevron Corp., which fenced off the empty buildings of Mentryville and left them to the weeds.

When California Star Oil No. 4, the well that gave Mentryville life, was finally shut down in 1990, it was without ceremony. Recalling the event, Reynolds wrote: “A switch was flipped, the draw works creaked to a stop while the long iron beam ceased its monotonous rocking up and down with a low moan.”

Times staff writer Aaron Curtiss contributed to this story.