Old Stuff from the Oil Fields
  (The vanishing outdoor oil museum of the San Joaquin Valley)

 

Wagons & Engines
(some antique trucks too) - These old photos show antique oil field trucks, wagons and engines of yesteryear - most from the San Joaquin Valley, but some from elsewhere. The old truck shown here on the left with the wood spoke wheels is hauling casing to a well that is located somewhere on the west side of the valley. The truck wheels are not that much different from the wood spoke wheels that were used on the horse-drawn wagons that worked the oil fields, literally just a few short years prior to the arrival gas-engine trucks. More than likely many of the drivers of these early truck had been teamsters that drove the horse teams on the old wagons.

 

 

A portable steam engine that the Union Oil Company used on their wells in the Santa Paula oil district of the Ventura Basin, which sits just over the hills to the southwest of the San Joaquin Valley.

 

 

A portable steam engine at McKittrick field in the San Jaoquin Valley. It is very similar to the Union Oil boiler above, except that the smokestack is on the opposite end.

 

 

The cost for drinking water delivered by mule & wagon to the west side of the San Joaquin Valley between 1903 and 1907 was $1.25/bbl, whereas crude oil was selling in Bakersfield for just 8 to 10 cents a barrel. Once the water was delivered, the same wagon probably hauled a load oil back to town, using water barrels that had been delivered on the previous trip.

 

 

As the industry on the Westside of the Valley evolved, operators realized that it was more efficient for the mule teams to hauthier crude into town in tanks rather than barrels.

 

 

A teamster at Kern River field on the east side of the valley at the turn of the century getting ready to haul a tank of oil into Bakersfield.

 

 

When the Kern River field starting producing in 1899, the Reed Crude Oil Company had a fleet of tankers based in Bakersfield, and they used twenty-mule teams to transport Kern River crude to the Santa Fe railroad depot in town.