Greetings family, friends and neighbors. Today's snippet is about the "guaranteed" get-rich-quick oil boom scheme that took place nearly a century ago in Castro Valley.......Hang on to your wallets!
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CASTRO VALLEY’S “OIL RUSH”
The thick sticky black substance that seeped from the ground had
been known about for centuries but it wasn’t until Edwin Drake of
Pennsylvania constructed the first oil well in 1859. “Black Gold”
was discovered in Southern California in 1876 and the first commercially successful oil well drilled two years later. The Los Angeles City oil field accounted for more than half of the states oil production and the basin grew to become one of the worlds richest oil producers and making dozens of millionaires. New fields were being discovered with regularity spurring the 1920’s “oil rush” to California.
It may have been the folks at Castro Valley Lumber Company, or
the Selmeczki’s who owned the local hardware store, that first noticed that something unusual was going on in the valley. A stranger in town, known only as Mr. Baker, had purchased materials and had begun the construction of a fifty foot oil derrick behind Fara Liquors on the Boulevard where there was a strong presence of the odor of petroleum coming from the creek. The mysterious smooth talking entrepreneur was going around town seeking investments in his “sure thing” enterprise that would most certainly exceed all other west coast oil strikes and make everyone the valley very wealthy. Charlie Gall had operated one of the several gas stations situated on the Boulevard that served the growing community as well as motorists traveling the Lincoln Highway. Charlie’s gasoline business was OK, however the big bucks during prohibition
were the clandestine alcohol products that he sold from the store he called the “Gas Castle”. It didn’t take long for wary potential investors to figure out that Mr. Baker’s guaranteed oil strike was actually gasoline seeping into the creek from Charlie Gall’s old rusty abandoned underground fuel tank!
Castro Valley’s oil rush quickly went bust and the illusive Mr. Baker hightailed it out of town with a good portion of the residents money, not to be seen again.
-Bill 11/24
Circa 1920’s Postcard “Oil Wells, Signal Hill District, Long Beach, Cal
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