Early Court Cases Pertaining to the Newhall Oil District


These early cases revolved around the Lyon's Station refinery and the Pico Canyon oil claim. Many of the participants in those historical events are represented here as defendants, plantiffs, or witnesses. Probably the most interesting case is Case 4437. This case has many case documents still available and the depositions make for some interesting reading, especially the two by Charles Mentry. Another good case is 6831. That case covers the history of the Pico oil claim from Hernandez and Perea to the California Star Oil Works Company.

All the cases were obtained in PDF files and none contained all of the case documents. About 90% of the original case documents were handwritten. The rest were actually typewritten. I manually translated the handwritten documents to text for this website. At times it was not easy, so there may be a few errors. I didn't intentionally change any word, but I did change some of the punctuation to make reading a little easier. If I couldn't read a word, I put "[?]". I made smaller PDF's of the typewritten documents that could easily be read.

Most of the court cases were obtained from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, from this website.



Andrew J. Kraszynski vs. The Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company. Case No. 596 filed May 14, 1874.

Andrew J. Kraszynski vs. The Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company. Case No. 2479 filed June 6, 1874.

Nathaniel J. Clark vs. Ruben Denton. Case No. 3375 filed July 15, 1876.

The California Star Oil Company vs. R.S. Baker and E.F. Beale. Appeal filed March 20, 1878.

R.S. Baker, E.F. Beale, et al. vs. The California Star Oil Works Company. Case No. 4394 filed March 22, 1878.

R.S. Baker and E.F. Beale vs. California Star Oil Works Company, Sanford Lyon, C. Leaming, and F.B. Taylor. Case No. 4437 filed April 22, 1878.

R.S. Baker vs. California Star Oil Works Company, D.G. Scofield and F.B. Taylor. Case No. 4438 filed April 22, 1878.

Henry M. Newhall vs. D.W. Alexander, Executor of last will and testament of Adam Malezewski, A.J. Kraszynski, et al. Case No. 4706 filed September 24, 1878.

Juan M. Luco vs. Robert S. Baker. Case No. 19531-3 filed July 19, 1886 in San Francisco. Transferred to Los Angeles on August 11, 1887 becoming Case No. 6831.



Judge Ygnacio Sepulveda (1842-1916). He became one of the first two Superior Court judges for Los Angeles County in 1879.