Taft's oil story is big enough to fill an outdoor museum

Taft is one of those California towns where the landscape tells you what built the place. The hills west of Kern County still show oilfield roads, pumps, tanks, and wide open work country. That is not background scenery. It is the reason Taft grew.

The town’s early boom came with the Midway-Sunset oil field. By the early 1900s, rail service, supplies, workers, and oil companies were all tied together here. The settlement was renamed Taft in honor of President William Howard Taft, and the town became closely linked to the oil work around it.

The most dramatic nearby story is the Lakeview Gusher. In March 1910, the Union Oil well known as Lakeview Gusher 1 blew in near Maricopa. State historic records call it America’s most spectacular gusher. It started around 18,000 barrels a day, later reached an uncontrolled peak of about 100,000 barrels a day, and produced millions of barrels over 18 months.

That sounds huge because it was huge. Still, Taft is bigger than one wild oil moment. The West Kern Oil Museum shows the everyday side of that industry too. The museum has indoor exhibits, outdoor equipment, old work spaces, vehicles, tools, photos, models, and displays about life in early oil camps.

That makes Taft a good stop for understanding a part of California that is easy to flatten into one word: oil. The town’s story is also about railroad sidings, hard jobs, families, small businesses, boom years, slow years, and people who built a community around work that changed the state.