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.
