Mohawk Gas Station, Oro Grande, CA. An interesting note: Oro Grande means great gold; at some point, all the dreamers and planners must have felt that they had stumbled into a little bit of heaven with the discovery of the first veins of gold and black oil in California. Oro Grande, which you will encounter after the town of Helendale and Elmer Longs Bottle Tree Ranch, used to be home to many businesses, including the Mohawk Station and Mini-Mart, Club 66, and the Riverside Cement Plant, which is still operational. Right in front of the railroad underpass dating from the 1920s is the above-mentioned Mohawk Gas Station. I was curious about the Mohawk station and Mohawk Oil; some in-depth research sadly did not bring me any closer to understanding the origins of Mohawk Oil, only that it was a chain of gas stations from the 1930s-1970s based in Bakersfield, CA, with offices in San Francisco. The company should not be confused with Mohawk Oil out of Canada. Mohawk was the brand for Reserve Gas & Oil Company; their larger stations were open 24 hours, a first for filling stations across the country. Mohawk was first bought by Getty, then Arco. Whats missing from the round metal portion of the sign is the side profile of an Indian head which was a trademark of Mohawk. This particular station unfortunately has fallen into disrepair; one of the documents I stumbled on in my research has listed the station, located at 19324 National Trails Highway, on the Emergency Abandoned Recalcitrant Property List for the California Regional Water Quality Control Board due to the strong possibility of groundwater contamination due from seepage from the underground tanks located there. This report was dated 2005; no update can be found; no other real sources of information, other than the origins of Mohawk, which I pulled off a forum from the website oldgas, could be found in my half an hour of searching. If anyone has any further information, Id be pleased to hear it.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:32:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015