for Old Town Newhall Association's Night Under the Stars Sept. 13 for SCVTV.com • Local Television for Santa Clarita
for Old Town Newhall Association's Night Under the Stars Sept. 13 for SCVTV.com • Local Television for Santa Clarita
Charles Alexander Mentry
Pico Canyon (Mentryville)
Born Charles Alexander Mentrier in France in 1846, "Alex" Mentry came to the Newhall area in in 1873 to find his fortune. Already an experienced oil driller who had punched 42 successful wells near Titusville, Pennsylvania, Mentry soon landed a job digging wells in Grapevine Canyon, at the southern end of the Santa Clarita Valley. In 1875 he formed a partnership to purchase a claim in nearby Pico Canyon, which had been explored in the late 1860s by Newhall entrepreneurs Sanford Lyon, Henry Clay Wiley and Los Angeles lawman William Jenkins. The claim had produced only moderate results, but it held great potential if only someone with sufficient technical and engineering skills would come along to work on it.That man was Alex Mentry. Mentry deepened the old Lyon-Wiley-Jenkins hole and drilled two others in Pico Canyon. It wasn't long before a San Francisco fiancier by the name of Demetrius Scofield — himself an old Pennsylvania oil man — caught wind of what was going on outside the sleepy burgh of Newhall. Scofield purchased Mentry's claim in 1876 and convinced the oil driller to come into his employ.
Mentry used what may have been California's first steam-powered oil rig to drill a fourth well, which consistenly produced 30 barrels of oil per day. Mentry kept digging. Finally, on September 26, 1876, from a depth of 617 feet, a mighty geyser of oil shot through the 5 5/8-inch casing. It was the first commercially successful oil well in the western United States, and Demetrius Scofield was a rich man.
Teams of oil workers flocked to Pico Canyon, which was soon being called Mentryville. Alex Mentry married Flora May Lake of New York, who gave him three sons and a daughter. He built a house known as the "Pico Cottage" in 1889 and is shown on its porch in this 1893 photograph — taken the same year that a major earthquake struck Pico Canyon.
The family ultimately outgrew the Pico Cottage, so with his savings from his monthly salary of $300, Mentry built a 13-room Victorian mansion known as the "Big House," which the family occupied in 1898. Two years later, Mentry was bitten by an insect and developed an allergic reaction. He was taken to a hospital in Los Angeles, where he died on October 4, 1900. He was laid to rest in the Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, where other family members are also interred.
Information from Chevron/Standard Oil records; published works of A.B. Perkins; and "Pico Canyon Chronicles: The Story of California's Pioneer Oil Field" by Jerry Reynolds. Cemetery information from Jack and Joan Beitzel. For more information read The Story of Mentryville by Leon Worden.
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