Pioneer Oil Refinery

The crude was worthless until someone could cook it. California Star Oil Works put up stills here in 1876, the year after the Pico Canyon strike, and ran the canyon's green crude into kerosene and lubricating oil. Mentry laid a pipeline down from the wells rather than pay the railroad's freight rates, which was the whole economic point. It was the first successful commercial refinery in the West. Chevron handed the site to the city of Santa Clarita in 1997.

What the plaque says

California's first oil refinery operated on a commercial scale, erected 1876. Restored by the Standard Oil Company of California in 1930 as a memorial to D. G. Scofield and his pioneer associates of the California Star Oil Works company, a predecessor of the Standard Oil Company of California. In 1875-1876 Mr. Scofield and his associates obtained California's first commercial production of crude petroleum in Pico Canyon six miles northwest of this point and built this refinery for the manufacture of petroleum products.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pioneer Oil Refinery — steps away
  The first commercially successful refinery in the West, built in 1876 to take the crude coming down the pipeline from Pico Canyon.
• Oak of the Golden Dream — 2.8 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.
• The Cascades — 3.5 mi
  The concrete chute where the Los Angeles Aqueduct arrives, and where forty thousand people watched the Owens Valley come south in 1913.
• Mentryville and Pico Canyon — 5.2 mi
  A company town in a canyon, and a mile and a half further up the road, the well that started the California oil industry.

More markers nearby

• Lyons Station Stagecoach Stop — 0.9 mi
• Beale's Cut Stagecoach Pass — 2.0 mi
• Oak of the Golden Dream — 2.8 mi
• The Cascades — 3.5 mi