Historical Marker
Mentryville
Newhall, Los Angeles County · California
Erected by State Department of Parks and Recreation, Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, and Newhall Woman's Club, C.F.W.C, 1976
The town came with the oil. Pico Canyon filled with more than a hundred families, a schoolhouse named for Felton, gas laid on for streetlights and a tennis court, all of it built around wells on the ridge above. Mentry died of typhoid in 1900 and the canyon emptied slowly after him; by the 1930s it was abandoned. His thirteen-room house, the barn, and the school still stand, and film crews have been using the canyon for decades.
What the plaque says
Mentryville, named after Charles Alexander Mentry, who drilled California's first successful commercial oil well in 1876, was one of the first oil towns in the state. Mentry's restored home, barn and Felton School remain on the site where the California Star Oil Works Co., a predecessor of Standard Oil Co. of California, was founded.
Where it stands
34.37953, -118.61085 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Colorado Street Bridge — 30 miBeaux-Arts concrete arches curving 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco, opened in 1913 and later a link in Route 66.
More markers nearby
- Well, CSO 4 (Pico 4) — 1.2 mi
- Rancho San Francisco — 4.2 mi
- Pioneer Oil Refinery — 5.2 mi
- Lyons Station Stagecoach Stop — 6.0 mi