Mentryville, California

01The Frenchman Who Struck Oil in Pico Canyon

Charles Alexander Mentry was born in France in 1847 and arrived in San Francisco in November 1873 with his father Peter. After a brief stint at the Holcomb Valley Gold Mining Company in San Bernardino County and a year as a San Francisco stockbroker, Mentry moved in 1875 to Grapevine Canyon to drill for the Los Angeles Oil Company. He soon partnered with Sanford Lyon, Henry Clay Wiley, and Los Angeles lawman William Jenkins, and later with J.G. Baker and D.C. Scott, to secure what became the Pico Oil claim in the rugged hills north of the San Fernando Valley.

On September 26, 1876, Mentry's crew brought in Pico Number 4. The well was the first commercially successful oil strike in California and would keep pumping for 114 years before finally being capped in 1990, making it the longest continuously producing oil well on record. Pacific Coast Oil Company, a predecessor of Standard Oil of California and eventually Chevron, took over operations, and the Pico Canyon field proved the richest in the state's history to that point.

02A Company Town Without a Saloon

As superintendent of the oil field, Mentry ran the settlement that bore his name with an unusual hand. The Los Angeles Times in 1900 called Mentryville "an ideal community of modest homes," where families raised children alongside a schoolhouse, social hall, bakery, bunkhouses, a blacksmith shop, and a machine shop. The main road was paved with local asphalt skimmed from the same geology that produced the oil. There were croquet fields and a gas-lighted tennis court.

What Mentryville did not have was a bar. Mentry, according to contemporary accounts, "imbued the town with his puritanism as well as his name," forbidding drinking and foul language within its limits. He built a thirteen-room mansion at the center of the settlement and lived there until his death in 1900. When he died, nearly the entire town, reportedly all but three residents, traveled to Los Angeles for his funeral carrying a floral arrangement shaped like an oil derrick.

03What Happened to Mentryville After 1900?

Mentry's death coincided with the slow decline of the Pico field's peak output. Production continued, but the surrounding boom shifted to newer, larger fields elsewhere in California. Families drifted away through the first decades of the twentieth century, and by roughly 1930 the town was effectively empty. Residents dismantled outbuildings and carried lumber with them; the mansion, schoolhouse, and barn remained.

The site entered a long second life as a caretaker property. In 1966, Francis Lagasse began a restoration effort that stabilized the surviving structures. The 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged the Mentry mansion, and in 1995 Chevron donated roughly 800 acres of the canyon, including the townsite, to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Disaster returned in the new century: a 2003 wildfire came close enough to the historic structures to scorch them, and a 2004 storm washed out the visitors' parking lot and flooded several of the old buildings.

04Mentryville on Screen

Because its Victorian buildings sit in a narrow, undeveloped canyon within easy driving distance of Hollywood, Mentryville became a favored shooting location through the late twentieth century. Exteriors appeared in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "The Color Purple" and in "Walking Tall Part 2," and the site has stood in for small-town America in television series including "The X-Files," "The A-Team," "Murder, She Wrote," and "Highway to Heaven." Visitors walking past the mansion today may recognize its porch from scenes filmed decades ago.

05Can You Visit Mentryville Today?

Yes. The townsite is reached by driving to the end of Pico Canyon Road, west of the Lyons Avenue exit off Interstate 5 in Santa Clarita. The land is privately held by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority on behalf of the Conservancy, and public access is limited to docent-led tours and scheduled open days; the original asphalt road, the mansion, the barn, and the 1885 Felton Schoolhouse remain the primary attractions. As California Historical Landmark #516-2, the site is protected, and visitors are asked to stay on established paths.

06What Remains of Mentryville Today

The Mentry mansion still stands at the head of Pico Canyon, battered by earthquake, fire, and flood but intact. The one-room Felton Schoolhouse, relocated to Mentryville from nearby Felton in the nineteenth century, sits a short walk away, along with a barn, a handful of outbuildings, and the capped wellhead of Pico Number 4 a short distance up the canyon. The oil derricks are long gone, but the asphalt road, the surrounding chaparral, and the quiet of the Santa Susana foothills make it easy to imagine the tennis court, the funeral procession, and the sober little town that once supplied a significant share of California's first commercial oil.