By Louis Medina

The Midway Oil Field’s Well No. 2-6 was called a “wildcat well.”

It was not on any proven oil deposits, according to information from Taft’s West Kern Oil Museum. It had been difficult to “spud” – or start —when drilling operations began in the late spring of 1909. The first derrick had burned down. A drilling foreman had died in an accident. Then, in a well log dated Oct. 30, it had been shut down “on account of gas.”

But less than a month later, on Nov. 27, 1909, the well in Fellows blew its top and began an oil boom so big that it changed both life and landscape in west Kern County forever.

In the decades that followed, once ubiquitous mules and horses used for transportation were eventually, totally, replaced by cars and trucks. Wooden derricks were succeeded by steel derricks, then portable drilling rigs. And now, bobbing pumping units add their own industrial charm to a landscape that in some spots even makes room for shiny rows of solar panels – the heralds of the new energy age.

Today, only a small, modest monument sits on the site of the Midway Gusher, across Mocal Road from the mostly shadeless Fellows Park. A state-registered landmark dedicated in 1951 by the Petroleum Production Pioneers, the monument boasts that No. 2-6 “was the best producing well for a long time,” with a production of 2,000 barrels a day in an area of wells that yielded only 40-50 barrels daily.

This year’s Friday after Thanksgiving marks the 100th anniversary of “the well which made the Midway Oil Field famous.” A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same in Fellows, the small town the well put on the map, which lies along Mocal Road, off Highway 33, between Taft and Derby Acres.

This dichotomy is evident if one looks beyond the predominating industrial structures that seem like moving creatures altering an otherwise barren and uninviting landscape. If one starts to notice the little sun-beaten homes and yards, and neighbors who greet each other by name, a different sort of image begins to appear. Tiny Fellows, a residential anomaly in the midst of energy-producing fields, includes the bare minimums of a community: a post office, a market, a fire station, the recently closed Derrick Cafe, the park, a K-8 school and homes. And even though the U.S. Census bureau calls it a mere “census-designated place,” its 150-or-so locals call it home and cherish it as a haven in which to perpetuate a traditional, simple way of life.

The Folks in Fellows

“Here you still have the hometown type of environment,” said Mike Beeman, a captain with the Kern County Fire Department who works at Fellows-based Station 23. “The people make an effort to be active where they live.”

And he should know: A resident of San Luis Obispo County who commutes to his job in West Kern, Beeman said there is less of an influence from big cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco in the Central Valley cities than there is in the Central Coast. He loves the “community involvement” his job affords him, he said, in a place where “people still go to the high school football game on Friday nights and church on Sundays.”

“I love it,” said Janice Rowden, who lives in Fellows and runs J&D Recycling in Taft together with her husband, daughter and son-in-law. “It’s a nice place to live,” her husband, Dean, said about Fellows, “because everybody watches out for everybody.”

That opinion of Fellows does not appear to have changed much among its locals since 85-year-old Dorothy E. Gardner moved there as a newlywed in 1947. She lived there for more than half a century, until she moved to Taft in 2002. “It was really nice living for the family,” she said of Fellows. “You knew your neighbors. The kids had a place to play.”

Agnes Hardt, 81, the West Kern Oil Museum’s director of volunteers and de facto curator, who has been around oil her whole life and also lived in Fellows for nine months as a newlywed, agreed: “The people who lived in those camps, it was like they were one big family.”

But post-World War II Fellows was bigger than it is today.

“It had everything or we never would have built a house,” said Gardner, who is the museum’s treasurer.

She remembers that there was a post office, two grocery and dry goods stores stocked with “everything,” a bank, a library, an ice house, a service station, a drug store, a hardware store, a barbershop, and Midway School, which is still there today.

 “There was everything that you needed,” she said, all on land owned by the Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil Company, a precursor to today’s owner, the Chevron Corporation. Her husband worked at CCMO, Gardner said. She worked for Berry Holding Company, which later became Berry Petroleum.

“They were the greatest,” Gardner said of the late 1940s and ‘50s in Fellows. “I raised my family there.” She and her husband paid $2.50 a month to lease the lot on which they constructed their home, an upgrade from the house trailer they originally lived in. “You rented the land but you built the house,” she said. She remembers company bosses lived on a tree-lined street called “Silk Stocking Row,” while laborers lived on the more humble “Rag Row.”

There was even a “teacherage” next door to the Midway School: As Hardt and Gardner explained, female teachers had to be single and live under chaperoned conditions in those days, hence the need for the special living quarters just for them.

Changes for the worse

But even then things were changing, with oil field workers and their families relocating to Taft and other surrounding communities where they could own the land their houses sat on. By the 1960s, according to the West Kern Oil Museum, “the camps as housing for employees were gone. All that remained were the offices and needed shops.”

Fellows, however, remained. The question, then, must be asked: What caused a town that once was booming enough to have a landmark hotel that now sits on the grounds of the Kern County Museum shrink to just 50-plus families living within an area of less than one square mile?

“Transportation is what made the big change,” Gardner said. Before, when roads and vehicle travel were not as good as today, oil field workers needed to live close to work. “As cars and trucks became better, that’s why they moved,” she said. “They could live six miles away (in Taft). Now they can live 40 miles away (in Bakersfield).”

Nowadays, about 70 percent of the people who work in the oil fields come from Bakersfield, said Fellows local Rick McDonald, a truck driver who worked in the “oil patch” for 25 years. But he thinks there are other reasons why many workers have left the oil industry, and with it, Fellows and other towns in West Kern.

“I used to have a lot of fun working out here in the patch,” he said. His crew mates were like family. “It’s changed now,” he said. “OSHA  (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) came in and took over all the regulations … politics, all the safety stuff.”

Neil Sharp, 32, is the Rowdens’ son-in-law and a former subcontractor for Chevron. “You used to be able to joke around with people,” the Fellows resident said. “Now if you joke around with the wrong guy he can tattle on you.” The sense of camaraderie and community that existed among oil field workers is not the same anymore, he said.

Gardner also said the company land leases on properties are to blame. Although they are renewable, the 5-year leases are a constant reminder to Fellows dwellers that the land their homes sit on is not theirs. The oil company holds the first right of refusal on the sale of a home, she said, which means the company has the right to be the first bidder on a home that is for sale. One thing the oil companies have done traditionally to reclaim their land is to buy for-sale homes that sit on leases, and tear them down rather than resell them to another owner. This has resulted in a decrease in the population over the decades, she said. “It’s such a bad feeling to know that you’re living in a house that some wish weren’t there.”

The weather, geography and environment in Fellows

 

Fellows is not a pretty place to live. It lies amid low hills that hold few shade trees and mostly dirt and low shrubs. It is similar to a desert, hot in summer, cold in winter and at night.

“There ain’t no shade, there ain’t no heater, and it’s pretty much an oil field,” said Sharp, who described working in the oil fields as, “in the winter you got the air conditioning on and in the summer you got the heater on.”

Captain Beeman said there are lots of brush fires in the summer. Morning rush hour along Highway 33 is from 5 to 7 a.m. he said – the summer heat, especially, forces everyone to work days that begin and end early.

He said energy companies now utilize cogeneration facilities in which they “extract natural gas and use it to produce steam to use in the drilling process for oil, and take return steam to generate electricity to power machinery.”

Kenny Braswell, who is a field supervisor for an engineering and construction subcontractor specializing in well abandonment – the sealing of wells that are no longer producing – said, “I think they need to put something else in there besides steam” to get the oil out of the ground. “I’ve been told the ground is rising about a foot a year,” said the McKittrick resident, who is a local at the Tumbleweed Cafe and Bar in Derby Acres.

Recent visits to Fellows revealed some environmental surprises. In late October, a lot of moths were buzzing around. The locals are used to different species of them swarming during warm weather spells. In mid-November the air in all the surrounding areas, including Taft, smelled like cat urine. Beeman explained it was a combination of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gas that comes out of the ground together with the oil in the extraction process. Nobody, including Beeman, seemed to mind it or consider it harmful when it’s dissipated through the atmosphere. However, well abandonment expert Braswell warned about the hydrogen sulfide gas in closed-in spaces or during drilling operations: “Some of that stuff will kill you in three seconds,” he said.

 

What’s in a name?

The name Fellows comes from an exercise in linguistic economy, or abbreviation.

According to information provided by the West Kern Oil Museum and the Midway School District website, when the township still didn’t have a name – as it was just a siding, or short railway track, off the Sunset Railroad southeast of the CCMO Camp –  materials were shipped there by rail to the attention of CCMO construction superintendent Charles A. Fellows.

“Ship to Fellows,” is how boxes, crates and other packages were marked, and the name of the addressee became, in effect, the name of the destination.

Fellows is a name as manly as the culture of oil drilling that made it what it is. And it’s very possible that the culture is what draws people to stay in the area.

Braswell knows his job is “one of the most dangerous jobs out there.” He even left the fields altogether for 10 years after breaking his back in two places in 1991. But he came back. “I like the people. I got a lot of friends out there. It stays busy,” he said. “It pays all right,” he said about the work. “It makes me a livin’, pays my bills. I’ve got a brand-new Harley and a pickup and a fifth-wheel travel trailer. Most of the guys on my crew got new cars. They make a pretty good living.”

When asked whether he would have liked to work in the fields around Fellows in the early days, he said, “I’m happy the way it is now, but when I look at the pictures, I wonder what it was like.”

Are you interested in oil history?

Taft’s West Kern Oil Museum is a great starting point for a journey back to the glory days of oil in West Kern. It’s also only about six miles away from Fellows and the No. 2-6 Well Monument, and it’s a good idea to visit the museum first so you know what you’ll be seeing on your drive out to Fellows and the Midway-Sunset Oil Field.

Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Tours are given both for school children and adults, and may be arranged by calling 661-765-6664. The museum is fully staffed by volunteers who are all very knowledgeable about West Kern’s oil history. The grounds are landscaped in native plants and special tours are given, pointing out particular plants and telling their uses by the Indians and early pioneers.

To get to the museum from Bakersfield, take Highway 99 South to Highway 119 (Taft Highway). Turn right and continue west for about 30 miles, passing over Interstate 5, the California Aqueduct and part of the Elk Hills Oil Field. Stay on Highway 119 past the stoplight and over the old railroad tracks to Wood Street.  Turn right onto Wood Street and look for the Oil Museum Parking sign.

For information online, visit www.westkern-oilmuseum.org.

Once at the museum, ask for directions to Highway 33 north to get to Fellows, the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, Derby Acres, McKittrick, and other places of interest in West Kern.