The photos in this section were part of a collection of 304 images by Edwin Branch of Long Beach, California, who worked in the oilfields of western Venezuela in the late 1920's. These photos, plus the bottom photos of the Lagunillas fire of 1928, were part of a large collection of photographs acquired at an estate sale and offered up for auction on Ebay in October, 2007. They were originally purchased by the seller in Van Nuys, CA.

I did bid on this collection, which eventually sold for $556.80, but I dropped out of the bidding when it rose above $200. While it certainly would have been wonderful to have obtained the originals of this historical collection for sharing here, I had to draw the line somewhere, and $200 was the limit that I settled on.

The seller did a great job of listing a good quantity of the photos in the collection and included many scanned images as well as links to their enlargements on the auction page. Once the bidding got above my $200 limit, I decided to salvage what I could and decided to at least copy the enlarged auction image scans, as well as whatever descriptions of the photos that appeared, so as not to lose them to all of us forever.

So this page is the result of that effort. I thought that it was important to preserve them and post them here before they disappear forever.

I unfortunately have no further information about Edwin Branch nor of the time he spent in Venezuela during the interesting early years of the oil industry there. There's no indication how many years he spent in Venezuela. All of the photos are from the late 1920's although some of the caricature signatures are dated as late as 1932. His fascinating collection of photographs alone - as well as the short descriptions of those images in his own handwriting - will now have to speak for him instead and tell us his story.

I'm happy to have stumbled across these photos so that they can be preserved here in a location where their Venezuelan oilfield context can be fully understood and appreciated. Mr. Branch spent a considerable amount of time taking all these photos and worked hard to organize them into detailed photo albums. As the photographs here are 80+ years old, surely all of those shown in these images are now gone. I can't help but believe that, were he with us today, he'd be pleased to know that his work lives on. Through these images, Edwin Branch and all of his friends and acquaintances shown here in these photos - in the prime of their lives and participating in an adventure of a lifetime - shall remain, to all of us, “forever young”.