Behind the Barrels: El Segundo's Buried Backstory

In 1911, The El Segundo Standard Oil refinery was opened, El Segundo is easily recognized as the Spanish phrase for “the second”, referring to Standard Oil’s refineries, but the details behind the creation of the city are still largely unknown. The truth is murky, and involves poorly documented deals and the rise of the richest person in the country’s history. This is part of the story of the beginnings of our city.

Contrary to what some may say, the “second'' that El Segundo represents does not refer to the second Standard Oil refinery at all, but instead the second refinery created by Standard in California, sparked when J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard purchased D.G. Scofield’s Pacific Coast Oil (PCO) for $761,000 in 1879, (LaHerald) `but the development of Pacific Coast may have been ground to a half had it not been saved by Rockefeller. The expansion of oil enterprises in Los Angeles had gotten quite rapid by this point, (notably, in the 1860s, Shell and Exxon started their first plants in the Ventura basin) Shell and Exxon were eager to move to Los Angeles when our oil field was found by E.L. Doheney in 1892. [eno petroleum corporation] 

The purchase by Standard may have saved PCO, but the powerhouse it created ended up causing an imbalance in the scene towards Standard's side (PCO had since been renamed to Standard Oil Co. (California)), and "in May 1911, Standard Oil (California) was separated from its parent Standard Oil and became an independent entity after the federal government won an antitrust lawsuit." (LaHerald) Under the new Standard (CA) label, Scofield seeked to create a new refinery, and R.J. Hanna from Pennsylvania was put in control of finding a suitable location, with "a ready supply of water, and access to a harbor for shipping"(Daily Breeze).

Hanna found a farm, owned by Frank Bennett(the land owned by George Peck), a melon and lima bean farm, and purchased it in June 1911, when his wife decided to name it "El Segundo", referring to the venture in oil that had led them to the unincorporated area, and was officially incorporated as a city in 1917. A single decade was all it took for the second large venture of El Segundo to take place, in the purchase and development of Los Angeles Municipal Airport, that would later become Los Angeles International; the industrialization and development of the city was spurred quite rapidly, but there’s still more to the story, make sure to read the next edition to see how Bennett and Peck even got to the city.