In 1876 when a French immigrant Charles Mentry discovered California's first commercially viable oil well and a new town was founded. Mentryville was an oil drilling town located 35 miles north of Los Angeles, California and 3 miles west of Santa Clarita. It is located at the base of Pico Canyon’s chaparral slopes and was built around its oil well, Pico No. 4. Oil was piped six miles east to California's first successful refinery in present-day Newhall and shipped out by rail.
Charles Mentry was the oil well driller and superintendent of the company that would later become Chevron. Eventually the Pico oil works were integrated into John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company of California. At its peak, Mentryville was home to over 100 families until the early 1930’s. Experienced drillers from Pennsylvania came to work the Pico oil field. Single men stayed in bunkhouses and family men erected cabins, a schoolhouse and bakery.
Mentryville was the first town in Southern California to be lighted by natural gas.
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