Taft and the West Kern Oil Story: California's Energy History in One Small City
In Taft, on Kern County's west side, the oil museum and the surrounding fields preserve the story of the boom that built west Kern — and reshaped California's energy economy.
Taft sits on the west side of Kern County surrounded by some of the most storied oil ground in America, and the West Kern Oil Museum there exists to tell that story at human scale. The museum's grounds hold the machinery of the early fields, derrick timbers, pumps, tools and a reconstructed wooden derrick, in a city whose very streets were laid out by the boom that followed the great strikes around the turn of the last century in the Midway-Sunset field nearby.
That field, among the largest in United States history, made west Kern a household name in the oil world and drew the workers, railroads and towns, Taft, Maricopa, Fellows, that still define the west side. The Lakeview Gusher of 1910, near Maricopa, remains the most famous uncontrolled oil spill in American history, a fountain of oil that flowed for months and became legend. California's rise as an oil state, and Kern County's place at its center, begins in this landscape.
The museum's work is preservation against entropy. Oil field equipment was built to be used up, not kept, and the wooden derrick era survives in only a handful of places. West Kern keeps its examples standing, along with the photographs and records of the men and women who ran the fields, in a city where oil is not an abstraction but a family trade carried across generations, around Oildale and Taft alike.
California's energy conversation has changed around this heritage, and the west side lives that change directly: production continues in fields worked for more than a century, even as the state's policies and economy evolve. Taft's museum does not argue the point either way. It documents what the boom built, a city, an industry and a workforce, and lets visitors stand inside the evidence.
For a full sense of Kern County, the drive west to Taft is essential homework. Bakersfield is the county's present tense; the oil museum is where its past tense is kept, under a derrick, in the wind off the Temblors.
