Allegedly – according to Wikipedia – Mentryville, CA was an oil boom town.
I’m not sure I believe it.
Right now it consists of a parking lot ($5 for parking??? give me a break), a house, a boarded up school and a couple barns.
Not too sure where the town would have been …..
For those of you who did NOT grow up in Santa Clarita with all kinds of urban legends about Mentryville and the cults that lived out there ….. Mentryville is basically a state part just on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, way out Pico Canyon road by Stevenson Ranch.
You can read the story of Mentryville or look at historic photos … which really are more exciting than the current sights. Literally a dirt road the length of a city block with 3 complete buildings. Maybe 4. And a bunch of rusting oil/farm equipment. A broken picnic table. Horse manure. Weeds.
But, in spite of the lack of physical artifacts left to represent the history of the town, it is still so interesting that this big (800+acre) area is designated as a state park! Good for California for at least attempting to preserve the state’s history.
A side note about the magic that is Twitter … the reason we went to Mentryville for a couple hours one Sunday afternoon is I was on Twitter and said that Andrew and I were trying to decide whether or not to be lazy. I got an @reply from Maggie that her family was going to Mentryville that afternoon and we were welcome to come.
Boom. Plans with zero effort.
God bless the internet.
{ You can follow Amy on Twitter here }
So we drove up to Santa Clarita for the afternoon and got to visit with one of our favorite 2 year olds!
Eleanor was pretty entertaining. And cute. As per usual. ….
{note: check out Maggie’s pics on Making Me Cranky}
Mentryville – being pretty deserted most of the time – is apparently pretty popular for photo shoots for Santa Clarita photographers. Who knew!?
When Andrew and I got there, this crew (photo below) were taking some pics …. and I’m pretty sure the girl was in a bikini. In January. In a shell of an old building. In high heels.
hmm.
yea, so Maggie and I spent the whole time taking photos.
Of course, I was hindered by little girl hand holding.
And I don’t mean Andrew.
Eleanor decided this time that she likes me best and elected to hold my hand (when she was forced to hold an adult’s hand) … her tiny little cold hands.
Can’t wait to see Maggie’s pics!
Maggie and Josh : Thanks for letting us tag along ….
Andrew : next time we should do a tour and actually figure out what we’re looking at.
Precious pics. Love all the texture in the buildings, the grass, the rusted steel.
Especially one that loves photography.
But seriously, how can you go wrong with a subject such as little Eleanor. She couldn’t have worn a more perfect sweater to photograph in. But then, a Mom would know that
Great pics Amy.
The vacant house behind all the barren trees is kinda spooky
Thanks for coming with us guys!
Here’s my pics: http://makingmecranky.com/2010/02/mentryville-with-the-schuberts/
That white house is the house they use in Big Love to represent where the main man lives on the Mormon compound with all his wives
They film so much of Big Love in SCV sites. Who knew SCV looked like Sandy, UT??
I love the one of Eleanor sitting in the grass! That does look like a great spot for a photo shoot. Isn’t that the place where Kevin went with his friend and the old guy chased them with a gun, then helped them look for Jeff ?
If you want to know anything about Mentryville and Pico Canyon, please feel free to write to me. If I don’t know, I’ll ask my mom who is the historian for the canyon. We were the last family to live in the big house 1966-1995. When we lived there, it was painted white with medium blue trim and red screen doors on both sides of the porch. It was very pretty. My parents and a family friend were sleeping upstairs in two of the 5 bedrooms upstairs in the big house on Jan 17, 1994 when we had the earthquake. The house had been built on many, many brick pillars as the foundation. Since the Northridge quake was on a vertical fault line, the house jumped up and down and off of its foundation and fell 3 ft. down and slid 2 feet into the rose garden. The wrap around porch fell off. Dad said he thought they were going to die. They were trapped in the house by the fallen porch until my dad took off the front door in the dark and kicked their way out the screen door.All of the front columns fell off. The rose garden was my mom’s and used to be on the side of the house towards where you were standing. My parents, Frenchy and Carol Lagasse, lived in the front of the house for a year-and-a-half living in a RV. Our family’s job there was to keep people away from, and out of,the active oil field that was there in the canyon until 1990. They are the ones that rebuilt and restored the Felton schoolhouse, which you took pictures of. Its too bad you couldn’t get in to see it, but if you go to SCVTV.com and look for a video by Philip Scorza and his wife about Mentryville, you can watch a video of them interviewing my parents inside the schoolhouse as my mom gives a small tour to them. My parents were living in the motorhome then-it was done in Spring 1995. My dad built the monument in front of the gate that bears the Mentryville plaque. It is made of Palos Verde rock that he brought down from the mountains..
My dad went to work for Standard Oil Co. of CA as a rousatabout after WWII in 1947. He remained with the company as a Pumper and then a Production Foreman (by then part of Chevron Corp. until he retired in 1987, but served as an active drilling and capping consultant until his death in 1996. When he died, the newspapers said that his death was the “end of an era”. He worked in the canyon and various other canyons in the valley and up north on the coast all of his career so he was considered the last Pioneer Oil Man. My dad, in later years, was the area foreman for the Santa Clarita Valley.
The house, called Pico Cottage, was finished in 1889 (they have the wrong date listed online). It was built by Alexander Mentry who drilled Pico #4,the successful commercial oil well west of the state of Penn. there in Pico Cyn. I grew up with that well, and all of the others in the canyon, pumping away until there were capped off in 1990 when the field was closed. There is still lots of oil in that field underground and the wells were still producing when they were shut down.
In its heyday from the mid-1880′s until 1992, the canyon was home to over 100 families. The built their homes up and down the canyon there and took them with them when they left or sold them to another family.It is still possible to see foundations of the bakery and some of the houses along the road when they are not covered with brush. The canyon once had a Rec.center,a lighted sports court, bakery, machine shops, blacksmiths, school 1st- 8th grade, and 2 boardinghouses for the single oil workers. The houses were lighted (and heated) by natural gas lights–the first to be so between LA and San Francisco. The big house was quite fancy with indoor bathrooms with footed bathtubs (that are still there), marble sinks with hot and cold running water, indoor pull chain toilets, gas lights and the latest East Coast styling. The house is a Pennsylvania Dutch Victorian with large rooms and much storage..even closets in the bedrooms! They didn’t have built-in closets in the large old houses back east. That whole house is built very solidly with redwood. It has 4 gas fireplaces(no wood)–three that we used when we lived there. The only thing that is wrong with that house right now is that all of the pipes and utility lines in the walls were broken by the earthquake-it is a miracle that they broke and there was no flood or fire. The house has been raised and put on the wrong kind of foundation, windows were replaced, but no one will ever live there again. the state of CA, who owns the house and canyon now, can’t seem to come up with the funds to keep the place up to the level it was when we lived there. My dad and mom worked hard and all of us learned to do all kinds of work to keep the place a historical place fit to show the public how people lived back then. The nearest estimate of the numbers of people we showed the house to in the years we lived there (we have boxes of guest books filled with signatures) is about 80-100,000 people. We had a big group of trained docents in uniform to help us with the big tours and tea parties. So that old house you were describing is much more than it seemed to you. Lots and lots of history and famous and important people have sat in its rooms downstairs and in what used to be a big, homey kitchen. Movie and TV stars whose names you would recognize have had coffee in that kitchen with our coffee mugs around our big round oak table. In the old days, silent and “talkie” film stars made movies there. Ever since movies have existed, they have been made in that canyon. (smile)
When my dad went to work there, the mountains were still dotted all over with oil derricks. He helped pull some of them down and fire took the rest of them over the years along with the old jackline plants that ran the wells before electricity. Mr. Mentry was a genius. If you want to learn more about the canyon you were visiting, go over to SCV.com and look for Mentryville. Follow the links. There is also an article about my parents and Mentryville and lots of old pictures. BTW, if you had ever wandered up to Mentryville when we were living there, we would have taken you all over the canyon. We used to give tours to people from one or two at a time to 9 -12 busloads at a time–free..and we never charged for parking! That is something they just started doing, I guess. The way the house and other buildings are painted now is not the way we had them when we lived there. Also, nothing was in the disrepair they have it in now. We took care of the buildings with our own funds (my dad’s salary plus money from the movie and TV companies for films, music videos and TV programs they shot there while we were living there)-no outside help from the oil company or any agency. Our family lived there full time and we were raised there. It was a working ranch with our 100+ head of cattle, some pigs, a few sheep to keep the weeks and brush down in the back of the house, several dogs and lots of cats—and a few chickens from the movie companies. We loved it there and so did our extended families and friends. On one of the draws in the canyon there is a large waterfall that only runs when there has been lots of rainfall. When we lived there,like in the old days, the creek ran from Nov.though the middle of summer when we used to dam it up and lay in it to cool off. The water is from a natural mountain spring full of sulfur, but can become a raging torrent in the wet winters. The house has been home to many of the foremen and their families since Mr. Mentry built it for his family. We were just the last family to live there and we miss it very much. Our children, the grandkids, still take their friends out to see where they used to visit their grandparents and where the heart of our family lived. That was our family home. The canyon was so peaceful-full of bird sounds and little animals. We had two big hanging porch swings on the front part of the porch people of all ages used to pile onto and talk. The house has seen at least one wedding (a family before us who we knew who lived there in the 40′s) and four wedding receptions (mine plus both of my younger sisters +the girl I previously mentioned). My mother’s prized roses covered the front rail fence from the gate to the cattle guard. The fence is no longer there I noticed. A big shade tree was in the front yard. They’ve left the very old olive trees in, but took out the 130 yr. old tall trees we used to have where the owls used to nest. The orchard full of fruit and nut trees and fruiting grapevines that we planted was where you were standing to take a picture and an acre square garden stood on the other side of the house towards the front gate. In front of the fence by the grapevines was an entire garden of various colored iris that they let die along with my mom’s formal rose garden after promising us that they would take good care of all of the plants. We left that and the blooming roses when we left July 1, 1995. Leaving just broke my parents’ hearts and ours, but the corp. double crossed us and the city of Santa Clarita and sold the land to a state “conservation” agency.
It was all worth it to see their faces! Best Wishes to you.
Over the years we held many parties there, many tours for regular and important people, reunions for families who had lived there and gone to school in the schoolhouse-including some of the teachers who taught there.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve written the story to anyone in print. There is so much more if you are interested in learning about the history of Mentryville. It is a history of the old west, the history of the ghost town you were standing in and of a tough group of families who called the canyon home. So many stories I don’t have time to write about. Many, many ex-residents (named by themselves-the “ghosts of Mentryville”)are still alive and have shared stories with each other and their friends. There was never a dull moment living there. My mom has albums of old pictures the former residents have passed on to her along with the stories that went along with them…pictures of the houses, the people and the life there in the community of Mentryville.
I just wanted you to know what you were looking at. Somehow the comment that you made about not understanding where the houses and the community had been made me want to share it with you. BTW, that unfinished wooden building close to the schoolhouse was not there when we lived there and appears to be a movie prop that soemone has dragged in there for pictures. It was not part of the canyon, but the painted wash house and privies were there in the school yard and also were restored by my parents for the 1976 Newhall centennial and the Bicentennial of the country. In 1976, we had the first reunion of all of the “kids” (people in their 60′s into their ’90′s) who went to school at Felton Schoolhouse. They came in and sat at old desks that we donated to my parents with inkwells and slates just like they had when they were kids there.
Nanette Lagasse Gaither (I’m on Facebook if you want to know more)
Hi Nanette, just stumbled upon your name and comments..will look for you on facebook. I am absolutely facinated by Mentryville and it’s history! Thank you so much for your post!! Andrea
My friend Kathy took GREAT pics. of my daughters here.Yeah there is not much to this state park ,but there is still something that fells like your own little world for the moment .It brings you back to simple ,peaceful and most all back to the basics..
Thank you so much Nanette for your post, I just visited Mentryville today, and it is wonderful to read from someone who lived the history we can only imagine! I’ll catch up with you on Facebook!
Did you notice that wen you soom on that big house you ken see some faces and two girls on the windows