The Pioneer Oil Refinery on Pine Avenue in Newhall dates to 1877, when oil driller Alex Mentry was breaking new ground in Pico Canyon and Chinese language monitor layers had simply finished hammering rails by means of Henry Newhall’s recently bought rancho. The little 15-barrel still that had been erected in 1874 at Lyon’s Station (now Eternal Valley Cemetery) just wasn’t figuring out. It couldn’t produce a smoke-free kerosene _ oil’s main use in those days _ and in 1875 it was shut. Apart from, it was nearly a mile away from the coming railroad.Andrew Kazinski’s brand-new stagecoach cease at the mouth of Railroad Canyon made the best location for a brand new refinery. Not solely did it have a bountiful supply of water for refining operations, but it sat proper subsequent to the practice tracks.John A. Scott, an experienced refiner from Pennsylvania, supervised construction. Scott moved the little 15-barrel still and another 20-barrel nonetheless from Lyon’s to Andrew’s and added a large, a hundred and twenty-barrel cheesebox still. Completed in August 1877, the refinery was an prompt success.In the meantime, up at Pico, Alex Mentry had resumed his effectively-deepening marketing campaign, which had stalled out after a water scarcity. Mentry laid a pipe from a water source in a neighboring canyon for his steam drilling machinery. Inside two months he was producing extra oil than the Pioneer refinery might handle, so a fourth and even larger 150-barrel cheesebox nonetheless was added.Oil itself was used within the distillation process. Heavy residual oil from earlier refining runs fueled the brick ovens beneath the stills. Tall brick chimneys vented what should have been huge amounts of smoke. Petroleum gasses passed into a condenser consisting of a wood field with 1,400 feet of layered iron pipe submerged in water. The condensed oils flowed into a lead-lined agitator, where they were handled with chemicals and blended with air to improve their burning high quality.The Pioneer Oil Refinery at Andrew’s Station added benzene and illuminating oil for ships, railroads, factories and mines to California Star Oil’s checklist of merchandise. The breadwinner, though, was -burning kerosene in two grades.Within just a few years, oil was flowing all along the California coast. An enormous refinery was arrange at Alameda, immediately throughout the bay from San Francisco _ a much more sensible location than the little burgh of Newhall. In 1888, the refining operation at Andrew’s Station ceased for all time.For a couple of dozen years, the Pioneer Oil Refinery off of Pine Street served to gentle up the western frontier. It was the first commercially profitable oil refinery in the Western United States and is believed to be the oldest current refinery on this planet. Right this moment its idle smokestacks and empty stills solid lengthy shadows on the dawning of California’s oil industry _ an business whose roots are intertwined with these of the Santa Clarita Valley.The Pioneer Oil Refinery in Newhall is State Historic Landmark No. 172. _ Leon Worden 1997Notes: The city of Santa Clarita acquired the Pioneer Oil Refinery property as a gift from Chevron USA in 1997 with the intent of restoring it and turning it into a public park. Funding was/is to come partially from developer fees associated with the Gate-King Industrial Park, which might surround it. (The refinery would find itself on the intersection of two roads leading into the enterprise park.) The Santa Clarita Metropolis Council authorized the buiness park in 2003 however as of 2012, building has not yet commenced.
AP2926: Needs to be rescanned.