Fellows, California

Fellows is a census-designated place (CDP) in Kern County, California, United States. Fellows is located 5mi west-northwest of Taft, at an elevation of 1316 feet (401 m). The population was 106 at the 2010 census, down from 153 at the 2000 census. Fellows is surrounded on all sides by the enormous Midway-Sunset Oil Field, the third-largest oil field in the United States, and the oil and gas industry accounts for much of the area's economic activity.GeographyFellows is located at.According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 0.7sqmi, all of it land.HistoryFellows developed as an oil boomtown after the 1909 discovery of the Midway Gusher. The first post office at Fellows opened in 1910. The name Fellows honors Charles A. Fellows, a Sunset Western Railroad contractor.Perhaps Fellows' greatest claim to fame was as the location of a fictional event. The 1969 educational film The Lottery, based on the famous short story by Shirley Jackson, was shot at Fellows. It featured a small town much like thousands of others across America holding an apparently ordinary, mundane civic-event that had a cold-blooded, horrifying ending to an unfortunate victim come from out-of-nowhere. The film was ranked as one of the two bestselling educational films ever and has been widely shown in educational settings across America as an indictment against unthinking adherence to tradition and general inhumanity.