A New Push for Land Preservation : Real estate: A historic oil boom town could open to the public after Chevron’s sale of 3,000 acres near Santa Clarita.

More than a century later 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.

During the half-century that the wells pumped night and day, the now silent, overgrown paths of Mentryville bustled with the men who came west to work California’s first commercially productive oil field.

In its heyday, oil-rich Mentryville was home to more than 100 families who lived in homes lit and heated by gas long before such amenities became common in big cities like San Francisco. Even the local tennis courts were illuminated for night play. Children of the oil workers studied in a one-room schoolhouse, and the sweets of the local bakery were renowned as far away as Newhall.

Yet when the gushers finally turned to trickles, the families who built Mentryville packed up their homes in Pico Canyon and moved on to the next oil strike.

By 1932, Mentryville was left to history, walled off from time by the steep canyon and the fences of the successive corporations that owned the land on which it sat. Rusty engine parts that once powered dozens of wells lay scattered among century-old buildings on the verge of collapse, their aged wood grainy and gray, victims of the elements.

But now that Chevron Corp. has agreed to sell 3,000 acres of parkland to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy--at the heart of which lies Mentryville--the public will once again be able to walk streets that have been desolate since the Depression.

The one-room Felton School--where classes were last held in 1932--several cottages and Charles Alexander Mentry’s two-story home 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 today remember Mentryville or its namesake, Alex Mentry, as he preferred to be known. 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 husband Frenchy Lagasse, has spent decades working to preserve the historic buildings of the town, including Mentry’s old 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 claimed, that a newspaper could be read through it--to waterproof houses and to ease arthritic joints. And even General 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 anywhere west of Pennsylvania. Much of that success was due to California Star Oil No. 4, a well spudded, or drilled, on Sept. 26, 1876, which continued to produce for 114 years.

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

Since 1966, the sole residents of Mentryville have been 72-year-old Frenchy Lagasse and his wife of 47 years, Carol. They 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 house came available, and they wanted to tear it down. I told them not to take it down,” said Lagasse, a stout and active man who himself once worked CSO No. 4. “It was a labor of love.”

In 10 months they restored it, but the Northridge earthquake undid much of their work, rendering the 13-room Victorian unlivable. “It was a rude awakening,” Lagasse said.

The couple now live in Lebec and keep a recreational vehicle in front of the Mentry house for occasional stays. They hope 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.

She said guided tours of the town could begin as early as summer.

The Lagasses, however, hope that the amount of visitors will be controlled so that vandals don’t deface the buildings. They said they would prefer large tour groups on weekends only.

“This kind of thing you can’t keep open every day,” Frenchy Lagasse said. “That’s why we want to stay here because we want to make sure it is done as it should be.”

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.

He was 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--turning it into the first commercially successful oil field west of the Mississippi River.

A town sprang up almost immediately as experienced oil men 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,” Lagasse said. “They straightened the nails and reused them; we weren’t spoiled like they are nowadays.”

Single men lived in tent cities and in the local 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. “With all the help, Mother had to get up at 3 a.m. to put up 35 lunches, as the men refused to eat the lunches put up by any of the help.

“The lunches for the night shift were made while dinner was being prepared. Breakfast and dinner were both very substantial meals, as breakfast time was dinner time for the night crew. In fact, I was a teen-ager before I knew steak was for any meal but breakfast.”

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.

Although alcohol was forbidden, stage drivers would hide bottles under their seats and clandestinely distribute them to oil workers.

“A person should have some John Barleycorn around the house in came of snakebite,” wrote Santa Clarita historian Jerry Reynolds.

“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,” Reynolds wrote.

Yet California historian Roger McGrath said oil communities like 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 like Mentryville tended to be veteran workers whose skills had been honed in the petroleum-rich fields of Pennsylvania. Many brought families, so diversions leaned toward tennis and croquet rather than drinking and card playing.

Mining towns, by contrast, tended to be more rowdy, more entrepreneurial.

Shops were operated by individual owners who came to make their own fortunes catering to the men--and the mineral towns were mostly men--who dreamed of the mother lode.

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. In 1897, Anthony Cochems Sr. opened the town bakery, which gained enough of a reputation for its sweets to be in demand in Newhall.

Over time, the wells slowed down. One by one, the derricks were dismantled, 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 industry in the West turned to big business. Standard Oil absorbed Mentry and Scofield’s company in 1900. Standard eventually became Chevron Corp., which fenced off the empty buildings of Mentryville and left them to the weeds.

When CSO 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.