Mentryville was an oil drilling town in the

Santa Susana Mountains The Santa Susana Mountains are a transverse range of mountains in Southern California, north of the city of Los Angeles, in the United States. The range runs east-west, separating the San Fernando and Simi valleys on its south from the Santa Cla ...

Los Angeles County, California Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles, and sometimes abbreviated as L.A. County, is the List of the most populous counties in the United States, most populous county in the United States and in the U.S. state of California, ...

, USA. It was started by Charles Alexander Mentry in the 1870s around the newly discovered oil reserves in that area. The first oil strike was on September 26, 1876. The town is located at the terminus of Pico Canyon Road, four miles west of the Lyons Avenue exit from I-5 in Santa Clarita. It is currently a part of

Stevenson Ranch Stevenson Ranch is an unincorporated community in the Santa Clarita Valley of Los Angeles County, California. Stevenson Ranch is set in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains and lies west of Interstate 5 and the city of Santa Clarita. Steve ...

History

Charles Alexander Mentry was born in

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on March 27, 1847. In November, 1873 moved to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

with his father, Peter Mentry. He moved to San Bernardino County to work at the Holcomb Valley Gold Mining Company. He moved back to San Francisco in 1874 for one year as a stock broker. In 1875 move to Grapevine Canyon and worked for Los Angeles Oil Company, drilling an oil well. He then went to work with J.G. Baker and D.C. Scott the Pico Oil claim. Mentry died in 1900 in Newhall.

D. G. Scofield Demetrius G. Scofield (c. 1834 – July 31, 1917), more commonly D. G. Scofield, was a pioneer of the oil business in California who founded a number of companies in that state and became the first president of Standard Oil of California. He ...

Mentry and financing oil well of the Pico Canyon Oilfield. In 1875 Mentry partnered with Sanford Lyon, Henry Clay Wiley and Los Angeles lawman William Jenkins. " Pico Number 4", a short distance up the canyon from Mentryville, was the first commercially successful oil strike in Californi

and the longest running well on recor

finally being capped in 1990. The Pico Canyon oil field proved to be the richest in the state's history to that time, and Mentryville became a boomtown from 1876 to 1900. The town was named after the superintendent who was in charge of the oil field, Charles Alexander Mentry. Mentry lived in the town until his death in 1900 and built the 13-room mansion that still stands there. In 1900, the ''Los Angeles Times'' described Mentryville as "an ideal community of modest homes," where families were reared and a schoolhouse, social hall, bakery, boarding houses, bunkhouses, blacksmith shop and machine shop were built. There was also a gas-lighted tennis court, croquet fields, and a main road paved with local asphalt. One thing the town lacked was a bar. Mentry had reportedly "imbued the town with his puritanism as well as his name," prohibiting drinking and the use of foul language. When Mentry died, the entire town of more than 200 people, ("During its heyday around the turn of the

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century, about 100 families lived in Mentryville. No precise figures exist on how many people lived there, but some families had up to a dozen children.") except for three individuals left behind in Mentryville, traveled to Los Angeles for his funeral, bringing with them a large floral arrangement in the shape of an oil derrick. Mentryville was eventually abandoned, partially because the amount of oil slowed over time, and partially because of changes to the oil industry. During the 1930s, most of Mentryville's remaining residents left, many tearing down their houses board by board and nail by nail, and taking it all with them. By 1962, Mentryville had become a ghost town, with only a caretaker family living in Mentry's old 13-room house. A visitor to the camp that year reported that "rusted oil equipment cluttered the canyon," toppled derricks lay rotting, and the cemetery was "choked with weeds, hidden and forgotten."

Preservation

The last caretaker of Mentryville was Francis "Frenchy" Lagasse, who moved into the old Mentry mansion with his wife and children in 1966. The property's owner,

Standard Oil of California Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

, wanted to raze the remnants of the ghost town, but Lagasse persuaded the company to allow him to restore the town. With help from the Santa Clarita Historical Society, Lagasse eventually began offering tours of Mentryville. Lagasse was forced to leave Mentryville after the

1994 Northridge earthquake The 1994 Northridge earthquake was a moment 6.7 (), blind thrust earthquake that occurred on January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 a.m. PST in the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles. The quake had a duration of approximately ...

damaged the house, and in 1995, Chevron (which had become the owner upon its acquisition of Standard Oil of California in 1977) donated the Mentryville site and the surrounding in Pico Canyon to the

Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy is an agency of the state of California in the United States founded in 1980 and dedicated to the acquisition of land for preservation as open space, for wildlife and California native plants habitat Natu ...

. A group called the Friends of Mentryville was organized to restore the buildings and open the old town as a historic park with docent-led tours. The site is now registered as

California Historical Landmark A California Historical Landmark (CHL) is a building, structure, site, or place in California that has been determined to have statewide historical landmark significance. Criteria Historical significance is determined by meeting at least one of ...

#516-2. A fire nearly destroyed Mentryville's historic structures in 2003, and a storm in 2004 washed out the visitors' parking lot and also flooded the historic buildings.

Film and television productions

Mentryville and Pico Canyon have become popular shooting locations. They were used in motion pictures, including

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California Historical Landmark Marker

Marker No. 516-2 at the site reads: Nearby is state marker 516 for Well, CSO 4, the marker reads:

References

External links

Friends of Mentryville website

LA Mountains Guide to Mentryville and Pico Canyon Parks

Scvhistory.com: Map and directions to Mentryville

— ''at Santa Clarita Valley History in pictures''. {{Santa Clara River Ghost towns in California Parks in Los Angeles County, California Open-air museums in California Santa Susana Mountains Petroleum in California California Historical Landmarks Former settlements in Los Angeles County, California History of Los Angeles County, California History of the San Fernando Valley Oil fields in California Santa Clarita, California Populated places established in 1876 1876 establishments in California