Mentryville

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

Worth the stop nearby

• Mentryville and Pico Canyon — steps away
  A company town in a canyon, and a mile and a half further up the road, the well that started the California oil industry.
• Pioneer Oil Refinery — 5.2 mi
  The first commercially successful refinery in the West, built in 1876 to take the crude coming down the pipeline from Pico Canyon.
• The Cascades — 7.6 mi
  The concrete chute where the Los Angeles Aqueduct arrives, and where forty thousand people watched the Owens Valley come south in 1913.
• Oak of the Golden Dream — 8.0 mi
  Gold was found in California here in 1842, six years before Sutter's Mill, and the oak it was found under is still standing.

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