This series of pictures of old Southern California was made by Thomas Milholland using the technology of the 1880s, in which the photographer had to mix all his own chemicals and prepare the glass plate negative in a dark room on his wagon. He lived in Valle Vista and traveled on many five-day trips to various areas to ply his trade.

A major trip with his horse-drawn laboratory was to the oil fields to make this week’s and last week’s pictures!

I believe that the site of the pictures on a foggy day was Puente Hills near Whittier and Chico. The tops of the derricks are lost in the mist, which adds to the artistry of composition that Milholland was known for. The plume of steam from the pump’s steam engine lends action to the picture. The bosses again came to work in their Sunday best and with a child. The only one there who came to work is the man on the far right, who looks like he might have been sprayed with oil from the waist down. OSHA inspectors would have heart attacks today if they saw people working on such precarious perches as those near the top of wooden oil rigs – where men needed to lean out to grab the hoisting wires and guide the drilling equipment – while others on the ground screwed the fittings together. How about working on Edward Doheney’s first rig, in which he had men digging with picks and shovels? They got to a depth of 155 feet when the noxious fumes got to them so much that they stopped digging and started dropping a eucalyptus tree trunk into the hole repeatedly, until they struck oil a few feet farther down. It produced 40 barrels of oil per day; Doheney was a happy camper. He soon learned the drilling methods of the Pennsylvanians and started drilling many wells in the Wilshire district of L.A. Eventually, he became fabulously rich. Advertisement

A nearby piano teacher, Emma Summers, noted the activity and decided to get in on the action. In 1893 she bought several city lots in the vicinity of Doheney’s wells. She continued teaching piano, but also got contracts for oil. She was soon known as "The Oil Queen of California" for her contracts of 50,000 barrels from her own wells and for the oil that she bought. Gutsy ladies existed even then.

The Puente Hills are forgotten now, even though the field provided a great deal of wealth to stockholders of Union, Shell, Standard of California, and later Chevron and Exxon/Mobile. Once the wells went dry and the derricks were removed, the land was too steep to develop for housing, so a large part of the oil field is now the Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority. Today you can drive through the area on the 91 Freeway without even knowing that Yorba Linda and Whittier contributed to the oil rush as well as to the Nixon family.

If you have pictures such as this, or if you recognize the site or the people, please call Bill McBurney at 951-304-3417 or e-mail him at billmcb2msn.com. The Temecula Valley Historical Society (TVHS) will award a copy of their new DVD "Early Boomtown Temecula" to the person who best identifies the subject of the picture.

The TVHS meets the second Monday of each month from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the old Pujol Schoolhouse on Santiago Street in Temecula. The May 11 speaker will be Bill Irwin, who lived at Murrieta Hot Springs when Alive Polarity owned the property.

McBurney is also interested in helping people to scan and preserve their old photos on CDs. "History should be saved" he says.

He sends thanks to all who have responded to his past articles.

Bill McBurney is a retired Navy Commander who was born in Hemet in 1928 and raised in the Auld Valley, Winchester and Fallbrook.

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