Exiting the five freeway near Valencia and heading west on Pico Canyon, we leave behind the tree-lined paseos and gated luxury homes of Stevenson’s Ranch. As the road narrows to two lanes and the landscaping gives way to chaparral and oaks, we drive four miles back… back… back in time.
As we round the bend on our Funday Monday Adventure, we find ourselves in the ghost of a town founded over 135 years ago.
After drilling the first successful commercial oil well in California in Pico Canyon in 1876, Charles Alexander Mentry founded Mentryville, Ca. It was complete with a schoolhouse, social hall, bakery, boarding houses, bunkhouses, blacksmith shop, and machine shop. It housed the workers and families of the Star Oil Co. Star Oil was the predecessor of the Standard Oil company and, as we know them today, the Chevron Corporation.
Known for his Puritanism, Mentry prohibited alcohol and foul language in the town.
Charles Mentry lived in his 13-room mansion known as “ the big house” until his death in 1900. The mansion continued to house the oil company superintendents and their families for the next 30 years.
With a population of over 200 at its height in 1920, oil production started to decline in the 1930s. By 1962, Mentryville had become the ghost town we see today.
Mentryville in Pico Canyon Woodlands Park is maintained and operated by the MRCA Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority.
It was so much fun to step back over a century in time and walk through, explore, and visualize life as it must have been for these early Santa Clarita Valley residents so long ago.
This is so cool!! Thank You for sharing with us… I Love history❣️When I was little we used to go to a place called “Bouquet Canyon” & picnic with the cousin’s…don’t remember how we got there!