Montebello highlight
Historic oil
Oil was discovered in Montebello in 1914 and commercially produced starting in 1917, making the city one of California's largest oil producers by 1920.
In April 1914, a nine-year-old boy named Thomas Temple found crude oil bubbling up through his family's land in the Montebello Hills after a rainstorm. Three years later, in February 1917, Standard Oil Company of California drilled the Baldwin number 1 well and brought it into production, marking the beginning of commercial oil drilling in Montebello. By October of that year, twenty-five wells were being drilled simultaneously, and eleven companies held leases across five thousand acres.
The Montebello Oil Field proved extraordinary. The Temple number 9 well, brought on line in April 1919, initially flowed 30,000 barrels per day and was called the greatest well in the state of California. By 1920, Montebello was producing one-eighth of all the crude oil pumped in California. The field transformed the city overnight from agricultural land and flower nurseries into a petroleum powerhouse, and Montebello officially incorporated as a city in October 1920, at the height of the oil boom.
Like the oil boom that built it, Montebello's economic foundation has shifted over the decades. That history of reinvention is part of what families plan for: businesses change, industries move, income streams shift. A term life policy locked in during your most productive years ensures that the people you support are not left dependent on circumstance.