It Was Never About Coal
The name on the sign sounds like it's built from the word coal, and that's almost right, but not the way you'd think. Back in eighteen eighty-eight, the Southern Pacific Railroad set up a spot out here where its steam…
Coalinga, CA
Coalinga sits in the arid heart of California, a place where the land stretches flat and the sun beats down. The name itself is a reminder of the past, a twist on an indigenous word that was forever altered by a…
Literally Rock Oil
· 0.4 mi
The word petroleum sounds technical and modern, but it's actually a tidy little riddle in old Latin. Break it in half. Petra means rock or stone. Oleum means oil. Put them together and petroleum means, literally, rock…
Coalinga Polk Street School
· 0.4 mi · Scraped Hmdb
Imagine a school so historic it was on the National Register, only to be destroyed by a powerful earthquake. That was the fate of the Coalinga Polk Street School. Built in 1908, the Old Polk Street School stood at the…
Oil Isn't Dinosaurs
· 0.6 mi
We call it fossil fuel, so almost everyone pictures a tyrannosaurus melting into a tank of gasoline. It's a great image, and it's completely wrong. The oil under Coalinga didn't come from dinosaurs. It came from things…
A Billion-Barrel Giant
· 3.8 mi
West of town sits the Coalinga Oil Field, and it is no ordinary patch of pumpjacks. Tapped around eighteen ninety, it grew into one of only a handful of California fields that have produced more than a billion barrels…
Cooking Oil Out of the Ground
· 3.8 mi
Not all oil pours like the stuff you put in your car. A lot of California crude, including some at Coalinga, is heavy oil: thick, gummy, more like cold molasses than gasoline. Drill a straight hole into that and barely…
Huron, CA
· 15.9 mi · Local history
The air around Huron hums with a particular energy – a blend of honest labor and the rich, earthy aroma of cultivated soil. Agriculture is the lifeblood here. Fields stretch as far as the eye can see, a testament to the…
Avenal, CA
· 16.9 mi
Avenal, California, a town whose name, "oat field," speaks to its agricultural roots, might seem like just another quiet spot in the vast San Joaquin Valley. Incorporated relatively recently, it's a place where the…
San Andreas Fault – Parkfield
· 17.2 mi · Historical Marker
The Earthquake Capital of the World, where the fault produces a notable quake roughly every 22 years.
