History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 24

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682

USA > California > Kern County > History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 24

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In September. 1890, the Kern County Land Company was incorporated, S. W. Fergusson was made manager, and the colonization of the Rosedale lands was begun. Extensive advertising of the Rosedale lands, the arrival of colonists and the expectation of the people of Bakersfield gave the town its next boom. Building, mostly of a light character, went forward with feverish activity.

On February 10, 1893. Kern river broke its levees and the water flowed over the northern part of the town and stood a foot deep at Nineteenth and I street, but in a few days it disappeared with little damage. The abundance of water which the flood indicated helped the Rosedale colonists-nearly all unaccustomed to irrigation-to over-irrigate their lands. Succeeding dry years and a shortage in the river largely remedied the error, so far as the lands

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were concerned, but the colonists meantime became doubly discouraged by the failure of their crops and the general hard times of 1893 and 1894.

When the Kern County Land Company fully decided that the Rosedale colonization venture was a failure it withdrew its agents, stopped selling land, and H. A. Jastro succeeded to the management of the concern and its great properties in the county.

Public Utilities in 1889-90

The first gas plant was built in Bakersfield about the first part of 1889, and the first electric lighting plant, run by steam, in 1890. The Power, Tran- sit & Light Company finished the electric generating plant at the mouth of Kern river cañon in 1897 and took over the street car system, which pre- viously had been run by horse power. In 1897, also, the Electric Water Com- pany took over the old Scribner Water Works and began supplying the city generally with water. Chapter 13 gives important events and dates of this period in detail.

Kern River Oil Boom

In May, 1899, Jonathan Elwood and his son James discovered oil in the Kern river field, gave a great incentive to the oil boom that was beginning to materialize through work in the West Side fields, and started the greatest boom that Bakersfield had experienced up to that time in her history. In Bakersfield the result of this boom showed mainly in the rapid building of business and residence buildings to meet the swiftly expanding demand and the laying of miles of cement sidewalk in all parts of the city. Before the movement for public improvement reached the point of paving more than a few blocks in the business center the price of oil dropped under the weight of over-production.

Bakersfield did not drop back from the effects of this boom, nor did it ever drop back from the effects of any boom in its history; it has always held all it has gained, and been ready to take advantage of the next incentive to growth that good fortune afforded it.

Present Prospects

In Chapter 15 the more recent events in the history of Bakersfield are related and it is unnecessary to repeat the story here. At the present time the city is looking forward chiefly to prospective colonization enterprises, to the settlement of the mesa lands through pump irrigation, and to the hope of electric railways joining this city and Los Angeles via the Weed Patch and other lines from this city to the West Side oil towns. Bonds have been voted for the construction of a system of paved roads connecting Bakersfield with all parts of the county, and by these and other means the city is hoping to maintain her supremacy as the trade center of the county. a destiny of 110 modest proportions when the vast resources of the county are developed.

Towns of the West Side Oil Fields-Maricopa

The first railroad station established in the Sunset oil field when the Sunset railroad was built in 1902 was called Hazelton, but the wells around the first terminal were small producers, and the development gradually drifted to the north. The railroad followed with an extension of its tracks past the present site of Maricopa to a point known to the railroad company as Monarch, but which never attained much significance in the mind of the public. Most

MARICOPA IN 1910

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of the people who bought tickets to Monarch found it more convenient to get off at a point a mile or so to the south where many shallow wells producing a heavy road oil were brought in about 1902 and 1903 and thereafter, and gradually-because the slump in oil prices discouraged haste in those days- the present town of Maricopa took root and established itself as the per- manent trade center of the Sunset field.

The first store was opened in 1906 by F. F. Torpey, and the first hotel was built by William Carter. C. W. Beatty opened a store in Maricopa in 1908, and also served as postmaster for a number of years.

During these years Maricopa was the only town in the West Side oil fields, and she therefore claims the title of Mother City of the West Side fields as well as the title of The Gusher City. But it was not until the gushers began coming in and the boom of 1909 and 1910 struck the West Side fields that Maricopa made any great progress toward prosperity or permanence.

But when the Lakeview gusher baptized the town with oil and the flood of land locators, prospectors and genuine oil producers began to arrive, Maricopa arose to the occasion. In 1910 the railroad company gave up the fiction that Monarch was the chief point on its Sunset line and built a substantial and commodious depot at Maricopa. A $12,000 grammar school building was built, two new hotels, the Lakeview and the Lenox, were opened to the public, the first garage and the first steam laundry were built; the WVagy Water Company completed laying water pipes from springs in the mountains, affording the city a good supply of water for domestic purposes and fire protection ; 7,000 feet of private sewer main were laid, and gas and electric light and power service were extended to all parts of the town. During 1910 new houses were completed at the rate of two or three per day, telephone lines were extended throughout the Sunset field with a central office in Maricopa, and later these lines were carried to all parts of the expanding West Side district by the Kern Mutual Telephone Company, a West Side concern.

Maricopa was incorporated in July, 1911, at which time the following officers were elected: Trustees, C. W. Beatty, W. E. Thornton, James Wal- lace, H. C. Doll and C. Z. Irvine; clerk, E. E. Ballagh; treasurer, M. Y. White; recorder, T. W. Brown; attorney, L. R. Godward; marshal, H. J. Babcock ; fire chief, Harry Parke ; engineer, L. L. Coleman.

On June 20, 1911, about a third of Maricopa's business houses were destroyed by fire, but all the buildings were promptly replaced by others of a more enduring character.

During the past year and a half Maricopa's growth has been a little less rapid owing to a falling off in the activity of oil development, but every year the permanence of the West Side oil fields and of the cities that depend upon them seems more and more assured.

Maricopa has good banking facilities, and is well served in the field of journalism by the Maricopa Oil News. Among the prospects for the future is a good automobile road connecting Maricopa with the Ventura coast, and an electric railroad from Los Angeles via Tejon pass through Maricopa to the other West Side towns. The citizens of Maricopa have been actively promoting the coast road for a year and more past, and are now very hopeful that it will be built. This will place Maricopa on the line of much through travel from other parts of the valley to the sea, and the electric line, if it is

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built, will give the people of the Sunset town quick and frequent communica- tion with Los Angeles.

Taft

The town of Taft has been at all its stages the logical outgrowth of the necessities of the Midway oil field, of which it is the business center. Althoughi the first oil prospectors who entered Kern county from Coalinga overran and located the greater part of the Midway field, the lack of transportation facilities, water and fuel and the depth of the oil sands as compared to that in the older parts of the McKittrick and Sunset fields discouraged develop- ment. A map of the field published in 1901 shows but six oil wells, all in township 32-23. At that time 900 or 1000 feet was considered the limit of profitable drilling, whereas the big producers of the field in later years were brought in. for the most part, at twice that depth, or more.

In 1903 and thereabout, in the Midway field, occurred some of the bit- terest contests over oil lands that have marked the history of the industry in the state, but the drop in oil prices just after that period reduced the activity of the Midway operators almost to the vanishing point. As late as 1907 the production of the Midway field was only 134,174 barrels for the entire year, less than half what some of the later wells of the territory produced per well in a month.

But with the cleaning up of the surplus oil stocks of the state during 1907. interest turned again to the Midway field, and the train of events which resulted in the building of Taft began. Foresceing that the possession of its own supply of fuel might some day be of great advantage, the Santa Fe railroad bought the extensive holdings of Chanslor & Canfield in the Midway field : the Standard Oil Company also began to acquire land in Midway-the first venture of the big concern into the field of production in this state- and the construction of the Standard pipe line from the Kern river field to Midway was begun. Under the name of the Sunset Western, the Sunset rail- road was extended from Maricopa to a point a little northwest of the present townsite of Taft, and a side track for the unloading of lumber and oil well supplies was put in. In the winter of 1908-9 an excursion of Bakersfield people went by train to the end of the Sunset Western road and spent half an hour looking at the sights of the embryo metropolis of the Midway field. They consisted of two or three shacks and several acres of oil well casing and derrick timbers piled along the siding.

But when the town began to grow it lost no time. By the summer of 1909 it had ten or a dozen business houses and some 200 inhabitants, and in July of that year it was given a post office with H. A. Hopkins, one of the pioneer merchants, as postmaster. Less than two years later the population had been multiplied by ten, and the business had increased still faster.

But there were intervening vicissitudes. Before the railroad was built water had to be hauled from Buena Vista lake and cost $8 per barrel. After- ward it was shipped by tank cars from East Bakersfield and retailed at fifty cents. The town was first built on the south side of the railroad track on land leased from the railroad on short tenure, and the architecture was of a correspondingly frail and temporary character. On October 22, 1909, at five o'clock in the morning a drunken man tried to light a distillate burner in a Chinese restaurant. He turned on the distillate and struck a match. The match went out. and he struck another. Meantime the distillate flowed out

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of the stove and through a hole in the floor. The second match started the fire. There was an explosion, and in an hour and a half the business street of the little Midway town was in ashes. There was no such thing as a fire department, and the total supply of water in the town at the time was esti- mated at ten gallons. Some of the losers by the fire were Evans & Parish, general merchants; W. L. Alvord, confectioner; Hahn & Krull, furniture dealers : Max Tupper, stationer ; Fred O'Brien, pool hall and barber shop ; Harry A. Hopkins, general merchant and postmaster ; S. C. Burchard, butcher ; James & Dooley, clothing merchants; Dr. Summers, and two or three others.

The remainder of the town was composed of tents, tent houses and shacks of the lightest construction. The railroad company in July had notified its lessees on the south side of the track that all that ground was needed for sidings, and had platted a townsite on the north side of the track where lots were offered for sale outright, except with provisions in the deed reserv- ing the right to drill for oil and forbidding the sale of liquor.

About the same time J. W. Jameson platted a townsite on the south side of the railroad a little distance from the tracks on section 24, and a sharp contest arose over the location of the post office. The railroad company won the post office and most of the business houses, although enough of the latter located on the Jameson townsite to make quite a showing and to keep the ultimate result of the rivalry between the two locations in doubt for a con- siderable time.

Up to this time the railroad had called the new town Moro, but as there was an express office in San Luis Obispo county by that name an "n" was added to the end of the name of the Midway town. But there was a Moron in Colorado, and the postal authorities objected to duplicating the name in California, as the abbreviations used for the two states look so much alike.

After many weeks of debate and the vigorous rejection of several sug- gested names, Postmaster Hopkins, sitting in the office of Postmaster R. A. Edmonds in Bakersfield one day, happened to raise his eyes to a portrait of the president which hung above the desk. "Let's call it Taft," said Hopkins to Edmonds, and the suggestion finally prevailed, so far as the post office was concerned, although the railroad still clung to the name of Moron for its station.

Up to the end of 1909 neither of the rival towns had made much progress, but with the beginning of 1910 both began to forge ahead with a vigor and enterprise that renewed the doubt as to which would gain the supremacy. But in September. 1910, the Jameson townsite was swept by fire, and the backset which it thus received put its rival hopelessly in the lead.

A movement for the incorporation of Taft was started in April or May, 1910, and on November 8th of that year, at an election called by the county supervisors, the proposition carried by a rousing vote, and the following officers were elected: Trustees, H. W. Blaisdell, H. A. Hopkins, E. L. Burn- ham, J. W. Ragesdale and J. P. Dooley ; marshal, E. G. Wood ; clerk, Dr. Fred Bolstad. The trustees appointed T. J. O'Boyle recorder, and Fred Seybolt city attorney.

The Taft Public Utilities Company, the first corporation formed to serve the public in the new town, was incorporated in the fall of 1910. It shipped water from East Bakersfield by tank cars, pumped it to a couple of 1200-barrel tanks, and delivered it thence by gravity to the consumers. On

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HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

February 1, 1911, the company's business and distributing system was sold to the Consumers' Water Company, a concern controlled by stockholders of the Western Water Company, which pumps water through a pipe line from wells located not far from Buena Vista lake in the trough of the valley.

The city is supplied with gas from the natural gas wells in the Buena Vista hills, and with electricity by the San Joaquin Light & Power Corpora- tion, whose transmission lines run through all the West Side fields.

In November, 1912, the town of Taft voted bonds in the sum of $41,000 for the construction of a sewer and a system of water mains for fire protection. The sewer was completed in June, 1913, and the fire mains and hydrants were put into service shortly thereafter. The city built a concrete jail at a cost of $1650 in 1911, and in the summer of 1913 completed a new $20,000 grammar school building. The concrete building used as a post office was built by popu- lar subscription, and free sites were offered to the city for a school building and to the first church that would erect a house of worship. The Catholics were the first to accept the latter offer.

At the present time Taft is a well-built little city of about 3,000 people ; has a good percentage of brick and concrete buildings; is well supplied with public utilities, as has been seen ; has a daily paper, The Midway Driller, and a weekly oil paper, The Petroleum Reporter, edited by members of the Petro- leum Club. Besides the Sunset Western railroad which connects it with Mari- copa and Bakersfield, it has an auto stage line running to McKittrick, and is promised another running to Bakersfield. Within the last few weeks an- nouncement has been made that an electric railroad will be built from Los Angeles through the Tejon pass and thence west and northwest through the Sunset, Midway and McKittrick fields. With all these facilities and with the rich and steadily increasing oil field about it, the future of Taft as this history is closed is very bright.

Fellows

Fellows first appeared on the map as a railroad terminal in 1908, when the Sunset Western railroad was extended from Pentland Junction, near Maricopa, to the northern portion of the Midway field. Nothing but a grow- ing or diminishing pile of lumber and oil well supplies marked the spot, how- ever, until the revival of interest in oil development in 1909 began to make it an important point for the unloading of supplies for the oil companies that began about that time to venture out into the upper part of the Midway val- ley. Then the Santa Fe, operating large oil properties in North Midway as the Chanslor-Canfield Oil Company, established headquarters at Fellows and made the place noteworthy by sparing enough of its expensively obtained domestic water to grow a row of cottonwood trees on the barren mesa. As the field developed Fellows became a modest trading point. James & Dooley established the first store in the place in 1910. Lawton & Blanck followed soon after with a similar establishment, in which was located the postoffice, and by the beginning of 1911 Fellows boasted two stores, a drug store, a billiard room, a livery stable and a liberal supply of saloons.

In the last two years Fellows has taken on an air of greater stability by the erection of better buildings, among which is a grammar school build- ing that would do credit to a place of several times its age and number of inhabitants. The Fellows Courier, an enterprising weekly, has been estab- lished recently.

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McKittrick

The town of McKittrick, which is the shipping and trading point for the oil fields of that name, is about forty miles west of Bakersfield. The earliest settlement at that place was called Asphalto, because of an asphalt mine located there in the early days, and the railroad, which was built to the field in 1891, still calls its station by the original name, although everyone else adopted the name McKittrick in 1895. The manufacture of asphaltum was the first industry of the town, and was the means of inducing the Southern Pa- cific to build a branch of its railroad to connect the place with Bakersfield. The railroad refined asphaltum under the name of the Standard Asphalt Company for some years. The first mail was distributed by Mrs. Quarra, but she did the work as a matter of accommodation and not as a government official. When H. F. Peters built the first store in 1900 he was appointed the first postmaster. Prior to this date A. Bandettini was conducting a hotel at McKittrick. The town was laid out as it now is in 1900.

With the general activity in oil development beginning in 1900 McKit- trick began to grow, and it has been conspicuous among oil towns for the even prosperity it has enjoyed, although it never developed the booms which sent the population of Taft and Maricopa into the thousands.

McKittrick now has about 500 inhabitants. It was incorporated in Sep- tember, 1911, with the following officers: Trustees. R. Butterfield, president ; W. J. McCarthy, S. A. Hubbard, H. E. Phelan and Fred Ehlers; city clerk. Warren Bridges. The McKittrick Clarion dispenses the local news.

Lost Hills

The founding of the town of Lost Hills followed the discovery of the oil field of that name, the story of which is told in the chapters devoted to oil. Martin & Dudley, discoverers of the field, laid out a townsite on sections 2 and 3, township 27, range 21, the winter following the strike. G. T. Nighbert erected the first building, which was occupied by a restaurant conducted by Mrs. Hamilton, the first woman in the new town. Nighbert also built the first hotel and the first store building, the latter being leased to Crow & Cullen, who previously conducted the first mercantile business in Lost Hills in a tent.

With the development of the Lost Hills field the town has grown steadily until there are now about 200 residents, and all lines of business one would expect to find in a city of that size are represented. Excellent tele- phone service with the fields and with the outside world is afforded, there is a daily stage to Wasco, and bonds for a school house have been voted.

Two explanations of the origin of the name "Lost Hills" are at the dis- cretion of the historian. One is that a traveler approaching the district from the east sees from a distance what appears to be a considerable elevation of land, but as he comes nearer the hills seem to fade away until, when he has actually reached them, they appear hardly higher than the surrounding land. The second explanation is that the low range of hills which bear the name has no apparent relation to the surrounding country and the man who named them may have humored the conceit that they had wandered away from the other foothills of the Coast range-from which they are many miles distant- and lost themselves on the desolate and uninhabited mesa.

As a matter of fact, the Lost Hills are formed by a very steep anticline

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which the wash of centuries has nearly covered with alluvial sands. But it required expensive drilling to ascertain this fact, and so it probably did not influence the selection of the name.

Towns of the Valley Farming Districts-Delano

The town of Delano had its beginning as a railroad terminal. On July, 1873, the Southern Pacific railroad, building from Oakland to Los Angeles, reached that point with its tracks, and work was suspended until August 6, 1874. During this interval of a year and fifteen days Delano was the end of the line, and freight to and from Bakersfield and all the valley and mountain districts south and even as far away as Inyo county, was hauled to Delano or from Delano by big ox- and mule-teams. For some weeks before and after these dates Delano was headquarters for the railroad grading and track- laying crews, and for many years thereafter it remained a favorite gathering place for itinerant sheep men at the spring and fall shearing times.

In addition to all these incentives to growth, Delano became the trading point for a large number of homesteaders who settled the fertile, sunny, attractive plains that spread between the railroad and the Sierra foot hills. The rainfall on these plains is scant, and the crops of wheat which the home- steaders raised were correspondingly meager, but the land was so easily tilled that one man with six horses and a gang plow could farm several hun- dred acres. As a result, Delano, a little later in its history, was an important wheat-shipping point. The more gradual development of the heavier lands to the west of the railroad brought a little more business to Delano. The organization of the Poso irrigation district, and the hope of getting gravity water from Kern river or from Poso creek nursed Delano's dreams of great- ness for some years, and when both of these projects had to be abandoned, the town turned to the pumping plants.

Delano was the first place in the county to build air castles on a founda- tion of pump irrigation, but the somewhat greater depth to water than pre- vailed at Wasco and McFarland, and the fact that a series of dry years and low prices had left the wheat ranchers too poor to risk investments in un- proven experiments delayed progress in the successful installation of pump irrigation.

It was not until 1908 that pump irrigation began to be a considerable factor in the development of Delano, but from that date on it grew steadily in importance, and those who are familiar with the soil and the water con- ditions expect to see Delano take rank among the most productive and pros- perous farming sections of the country.

The first store in Delano was conducted by E. Chauvin, and stood nearly straight across the street from the railroad depot. Chauvin also was the first postmaster. The principal business houses of the earliest days faced the rail- road, but in 1890 a fire swept most of them away, and the next street to the east took front rank in importance. The town now boasts two business streets, a fair number of brick buildings, a large grammar school building, a high school, opened in 1912, a bank, three churches, Baptist, Methodist and Catholic, two grain warehouses, and a weekly newspaper. the Delano Record.

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History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 24

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1682

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682