Yorba Linda's oil fields, Nixon birthplace

An invitation to speak at last week's Yorba Linda Historical Society meeting allowed me to expand on past columns regarding the importance of the oil industry to this community and add details to the peculiar story of an “oil discovery” on the Nixon birthplace property.

Tracking a century-long flow of oil from underneath Yorba Linda's 20-square-miles is complicated because some fields partly inside present city boundaries include wells on land in several surrounding cities.

Yorba Linda currently sits on all or parts of seven fields, with four labeled active by the Department of Gas, Oil and Geothermal Resources, a state agency listing 2,215 wells in the fields, with 1,309 termed “producing.”

The fields, clockwise from the city's northwestern boundary, are Coyote East (including parts of Brea, Fullerton, La Habra and Placentia), with 504 wells since 1909; Yorba Linda in the Vista Del Verde area, with 832 wells since 1930; and Esperanza, with 23 wells since 1956.

Continuing clockwise are three smaller, now-abandoned fields, Kraemer Northeast, Kraemer and Kraemer West, with 55 wells since 1953, 1918 and 1956, and Richfield in the southwest (including parts of Anaheim and Placentia), with 801 wells since 1919.

Bob Silva, Yorba Linda's building official, told me, “The city does not maintain an accurate count of the abandoned wells,” but he stated, “We do inspect active well sites yearly.” Senior Community Preservation Officer Howard Weldon noted the city has 36 active wells and 18 storage tanks operated by seven companies.

The Nixon property oil story is intriguing. Nixon, on his last day as president, paid tribute to his father, Frank, who owned “the poorest lemon ranch in California” but “sold it before they found oil on it.” Nixon repeated the story in his memoirs, and his mother had told the tale for a 1960 “Good Housekeeping” article.

But historian Stephen Ambrose related in his even-handed Nixon biography: “In 1919, there was an oil boom in Yorba Linda and Frank made a major financial error. A speculator offered him $45,000 for his property. Frank turned it down. 'If there's oil on it, I'll hang on to it,' he said. It turned out to be no better for oil than it was for lemons, and when Frank did sell, he got less than 10 percent of what had been offered.”

Earl Mazo noted in a favorable Nixon biography, as Frank picked a location for a gas station venture: “... two good sites for the station were available to him...two miles apart. After much deliberation he chose the East Whittier site over one at Santa Fe Springs. A year later oil was discovered on the Santa Fe property. The very first well was a 25-barrel-a-day gusher.”

Fawn Brody, who interviewed “old Yorba Linda residents” for a biography highly critical of Nixon, stated they found Nixon's resignation-day oil statement “troubling.”