It was on Nov. 17, 1870, only 11 years after he arrived in Los Angeles from his native Bavaria speaking no English, that Hellman bought the historic Rancho Cucamonga at a sheriff’s sale.

Eight years earlier, John Rains, then owner of Rancho Cucamonga, had been murdered in San Dimas en route to Los Angeles, a crime that was never solved.

Through mismanagement and plenty of intrigue, his widow Dona Maria Merced Rains ultimately lost the rancho to foreclosure, allowing Hellman to pick it up at the sale for $49,819. Only 10 days later, the shrewd Hellman then sold off about a third of the land and its valuable water rights for more than he paid for it – about $53,000. A good share of this property ultimately made its way to George Chaffey who later developed what is today Ontario and Upland.

One of Southern California’s first bankers, Hellman became a key player in the wine industry in California, holding on to Rains’ vineyards and some land in what is today western Rancho Cucamonga for 47 years. He finally sold his last Inland Valley holdings about 1917, three years before his death in 1920.

What’s intriguing about Hellman is why he is rarely discussed in the same sentence with the movers and shakers of California of the late 1800s. In many cases Hellman helped finance many of their private investments – agriculture, railroads, oil, publishing – that made the state grow quickly into a most important part of the U.S. economy.

Some of his dealings:

He founded the Farmers and Merchants Bank, Los Angeles’ first successful bank, which later became Security First National Bank. He also founded Wells Fargo Bank and at one time was president or director of 17 West Coast banks. Hellman twice helped end bank panics in the state when he put on display gold bars, showing customers his firm was financially secure. After the 1906 earthquake, he briefly operated the Wells Fargo Bank out of his San Francisco home.

He and partner (and former governor) John Downey helped raise $600,000 in cash and land to convince the Southern Pacific to build the first railroad from San Francisco into Los Angeles.

Hellman’s financing funded expansion of Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric interurban trolley system, bringing the first mass transit to Southern California.

In addition to Rancho Cucamonga, Hellman purchased part of the Los Alamitos rancho, land on which oil in the Long Beach area was later discovered. He would later provide financing for Edward Doheny, who would develop much of the Los Angeles-area oil fields.

He and his partners at one time owned the Repetto Ranch (today’s Montebello and Monterey Park) and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and held shares in the Azusa Land and Water Co.

Harrison Gray Otis got financing from Hellman to buy out his partner and assume full ownership of the Los Angeles Times.

For 37 years, Hellman was a board member of the University of California.

His land south of the center of Los Angeles had limited value because it was so distant from downtown. About 1880, he gave some of it for the campus of the University of Southern California, a donation which not coincidentally increased the value of his adjacent property.

Given all of his roles in so many of the state’s institutions, it’s hard to figure why Hellman’s name is not regularly mentioned as prominently in our history as Huntington, Crocker, Stanford, Doheny and others who were his contemporaries.

Part of it may be because he was a banker, never the most beloved of professions. But it could also be because Hellman was Jewish – in fact, he came to Los Angeles because the lack of opportunity for Jews in Bavaria. Even though being one of the two or three richest men in California in the 1890s, Hellman’s role in our history may have been less remembered because of his heritage.

His great-great-granddaughter Frances Dinkelspiel, who authored the 2008 book, “Towers of Gold,” about Hellman, said she was also puzzled by his relative obscurity.

“What does it say about legacy when a man as rich and powerful as Hellman is virtually forgotten less than one hundred years after his death,” she mused.

Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Valley history. He can be reached at 909-483-9382, by email at[email protected]or Twitter @JoeBlackstock.