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Signal Hill's Black Gold by Ray Zeman
Before dawn on June 23,1921, a wild gusher of crude oil blew out at Hill Street and Temple Avenue on a Long Beach hill named for its early role in history - signaling. Skyrocketi ng over a wooden derrick's 114-foot crown block, this geyser started a second run of fortune hunters to California. But this time the setting was Signal Hill instead of the American River and the Mother Lode. The new prize was not just gold. It was black gold, priced at $1.50 a barrel but destined to soar much higher in the boom of the Automobile Age.
In 1921 this wildcat discovery well, Alamitos No.1, tapped an obscure mound atop more than a billion barrels of oil, the richest oil field per acre in history. Within two years, 272 wells were spurting 68 million barrels annually from Signal Hill. In the first 50 years, more than 2,400 Signal Hill wells produced 859 million barrels of oil and more than 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The original eruption from Alamitos No. 1 raged out of control until 4:00 A.M. June 25, when Shell Oil crewmen diverted the flow into storage tanks, with 500 spectators cheering the results. Alamitos No.1 was heralding a new history for Signal Hill and the city of Long Beach which surrounded it. It spawned a thousand stories - of millions won by a few, of family savings lost by many, of a great harbor and of thousands of new homes below the hill that marked the end to the romantic days of the ranchos. Today, instead of a forest of oil derricks, Signal Hill has only a fraction of them still pumping lustily away amid a nondescript collection of abandoned wells and deteriorated tanks.
As land is cleared of equipment, the hill may still fulfill the dreams of developers who, before the oil bonanza, envisioned it as a site for beautiful homes with spectacular panoramic vIews. Signal Hill's lore became part of American history in 1542, when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed near the beach two miles below and named the present San Pedro Bay "Bahia de los Fumos" (Bay of Smokes). Pubug-na Indians, living in stick-and-mud huts near the hill, had set fires to drive rabbits into small areas for easy capture. Legend also says these Indians, long before, had lighted similar fires on Signal Hill to contact tribes on Santa Catalina Island and white men later reputedly used the 365-foot elevation above sea level to signal smugglers and buccaneers.
The first recorded owner of Signal Hill was Don Manuel Nieto, a faithful soldier, who received a 300,000-acre grant in 1784 when Governor Pedro Fages began to distribute land in the name of the King of Spain. The Nieto grant covered everything from the foothills to the ocean between the Los Angeles and Santa Ana rivers, overlapping holdings of the San Gabriel Mission . When Nieto died in 1804 his six ranchos and enormous herds of cattle and horses had made him the wealthiest man in California.
A son, Don Juan Jose Nieto, succeeded to Rancho Los Alamitos (the Little Cottonwoods) and a daughter, Dona Manuela Nieto, inherited Rancho Los Cerritos (The Little Hills). In 1834 Don Jose Nieto sold Rancho Los Alamitos - comprising 28,000 acres of his father's vast holdings to Governor Jose Figueroa for $500. Figueroa died a year later and Abel Stearns, a Massachusetts Yankee who had acquired Mexican citizenship, bought the rancho in 1842 for $5,500 in hides and tallow.
Stearns later bought other lands and eventually held more than 20,000 acres, ranging from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. However, the great drought of 1862-64 wiped out most of his herds and he lost Rancho Los Alamitos in the foreclosure of a $20,000 mortgage. Meanwhile, another Massachusetts Yankee, John Temple, who also had acquired Mexican citizenship, married the daughter of Dona Manuela Nieto and bought the interests of the neighboring 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos for $3,025 in 1843, from his wife's brothers and sisters.
A line drawn on what would now be Alamitos Avenue divided Rancho Los Cerritos on the west from Rancho Los Alamitos on the east. Every year the fastest horses bearing the colors of these ranchos would vie in a race from Signal Hill to the ocean. They would round a pole in the area of the later Pacific Coast Club and Villa Riviera and return. EI Becerro, a magnificent bay owned by Temple, once won the most famous of these races when the stake was 1,000 head of cattle.
Another story handed down through the years by Preston Hotchkis, president of the Bixby Ranch Company, and his wife, Mrs. Katharine Bixby Hotchkis, is of a senorita whose hand was sought by two vaqueros. Undecided as to which one to wed, she asked them to race on horseback between Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos. "The girl married the winner," Hotchkis said. During the 1862-64 drought, 50,000 cattle died on Rancho Los Alamitos. Temple was mortgaging his holdings and by 1878 all of what is now Signal Hill and Long Beach had passed into the hands of the Bixby family and a banking associate, R.W. Hellman.
At one time they also owned half of what is now the huge Irvine Ranch in Orange County and the greater part of Rancho Los Palos Verdes. The movement of the Bixby clan from Maine to California had begun in 1851, when Lewellyn Bixby and his brother Amasa boarded a side wheeler in New York, crossed the Isthmus of Page Three By the time Signal Hill was incorporated as a city in 1924, the hill had become a forest of giant wooden oil derricks and metal storage tanks. - Ernest Marquez Collection.
Panama and visited cousins who were seeking gold at the Volcano diggings near Sacramento. In 1852 Lewellyn Bixby went home with the cousins, Benjamin Flint and Dr. Thomas Flint, but a few months later the trio drove 2,000 head of sheep from Illinois to Los Angeles County and then on to San Jose.
They came south in 1866, purchasing Rancho Los Cerritos from Temple for $20,000, or about 74 cents an acre. Other Bixbys and Hellman bought Rancho Los Alamitos a dozen years later for $125,000. The Bixbys were interested primarily in sheep raising but in 1880 they gave an option on 4,000 acres to William E. Willmore, a former English school teacher.
Willmore, admiring the majestic view from the hill to the sea, began advertising throughout the nation what he called Willmore City. He offered small plots at $12.50 to $20 an acre. Despite his zeal, by 1884 there were only 12 houses in the area below the hill and when Willmore left for Arizona the community was renamed Long Beach. Page Four The only known likeness of William Erwin Willmore, father of "Willmore City" in this sketch by Alfred S. Harkness.
