Advertisement for Farmers and Merchants Bank

In 1871, Hellman founded the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles with former California governor John G. Downey and twenty-one others. It became Los Angeles’s first successful banking enterprise. This advertisement boasts of the bank’s prosperity in 1902: capital, surplus, and profits in the amount of $1,569,220 (approximately $42.3 million in 2011), and deposits totaling $7,600,000 (approximately $205 million in 2011).

Source: Imperial Press and Farmer (Imperial, San Diego County), August 23, 1902.