Pioneer Oil Refinery

The crude coming out of Pico Canyon had to go somewhere, and from 1876 it went here, down a pipeline to a refinery on Pine Street in Newhall. It was the first commercially successful oil refinery in the West. By 1880 it was turning the output of California's first commercial well into kerosene and lubricants, with stills set on brick foundations, two of them rated at a hundred and fifty barrels a day each.

Chevron, which is what the company that built it eventually became, gave the refinery back to the city of Santa Clarita in 1997. What survives is a cluster of stills and tanks on a small lot in the middle of an ordinary street, among the oldest surviving refinery equipment anywhere in the world. It is worth understanding what you are looking at before you arrive, because nothing about the setting announces it: this is the downstream end of the pipe from the well up the canyon, and between them they are the start of an industry that remade California inside of thirty years. Ten minutes and a look through the fence is a reasonable visit. The two sites read as one story and are ten minutes apart by car.