This is one of five historic homes I selected for a “Trail” guide I curated for Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. Download the entire “Let’s Hit the Trail Kids!” guide for free here.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places (and designated a National Historic Landmark) on April 15, 1970

The Los Cerritos Ranch House in Long Beach dates to 1844, making it one of the oldest extant homes in Los Angeles County. It was also the largest adobe built in southern California during the 27-year period from 1821-1848, when the entire area was Mexican territory.

Today the house and surrounding grounds function as a well-cared-for museum. On one level, it gives you a good sense of how LA’s wealthier pioneer families lived back in the mid-1800s. But peel back the layers of its history, and something even more compelling emerges. This house witnessed LA County’s transition from undeveloped ranch land, to prosperous agricultural paradise, to a network of subdivisions that eventually coalesced into separate cities. You can read into its history the story of Los Angeles becoming itself.  

The Early Days

In 1930, when the owners of Rancho Los Cerritos were preparing to remodel the house, they discovered a set of 11 cogged stones dating from 2-5000 BCE, indicating the presence of ancient indigenous inhabitants in the area. We know from the archaeological record that these early settlers were eventually displaced by the Native Americans called the Tongva or Kizh, some time between 500 and 1200 CE. When the Spanish missionaries came to California in 1769, most of the Tongva (and other tribes) were forced into the mission system. The Tongva who lived on the land that became Rancho Los Cerritos would have gone to Mission San Gabriel (see Etan Does LA visit #43), about 20 miles north.

The land that the ranch house was built on was once part of a massive 167,000 acre land grant, given by the Spanish king to a soldier named Manuel Nieto in 1784 (it was 300,000 acres before Mission San Gabriel protested that Nieto was encroaching on their land). After Manuel died in 1804 his children took over, and eventually they split the land into six parcels, with 27,000 acres on the east bank of the LA River going to Manuel’s daughter, Manuela Cota. She and her husband grew crops and raised children and cattle (almost as many children as cattle). But Manuela died, as people tend to, and in 1843 her heirs sold the entire property to a yankee named John Temple for just over $3000 – about $120,000 in today’s money. 

Enter the Temple

John Temple was born in Massachusetts and spent his early professional life at sea, commanding a ship that traded with the natives in the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands). In 1827 he sailed for San Diego, where he learned Spanish, got baptized as a Roman Catholic, became a Mexican citizen and changed his name to “Juan.” He found a bride in a prominent Californio family: Rafaela Cota, a relative of the Nietos who owned Rancho Los Cerritos.

Temple soon moved to Los Angeles, where he opened what’s regarded as LA’s first general store, and made a fortune by trading goods up and down the California and Mexican coast. Years later, after California became part of the US, Temple served as LA’s first American mayor, and one of its early developers. He and his younger brother Francisco developed Temple Block, a collection of buildings that was the center of commercial and social life in downtown LA in the mid-1800s. Temple Street, in modern day downtown and Historic Filipinotown? It’s named after John.

Clearly “Don Juan” Temple was a mover and shaker in Los Angeles business and politics. When he built the Los Cerritos ranch house in 1844, he intended the house to be both a summer home away from LA proper, and the center of his growing cattle-raising enterprise. At one point he owned some 15,000 head of cattle, which he would drive all the way up to the gold mines of northern California, to feed the miners who had flooded in during the Gold Rush in the late 1840s and early 1850s. He sold cowhides and tallow, too, and kept thousands of sheep and horses for good measure.  

The Los Cerritos ranch house itself is a fine example of Monterey colonial architecture, with a central two-story adobe surrounded by a wide, wraparound veranda on each floor. Attached to the two-story portion are two one-story extensions that housed store rooms, a blacksmith shop, a dairy and living quarters for the Temples’ indigenous servants, forming a U shape that surrounded a central courtyard. The U is closed off by a simple adobe wall with a double door. During the Temple years, the roof of the main wings was made of simple asphalt, though later renovations replaced it with wood shingles, and then the red Spanish tile that you see on almost every Spanish colonial revival building in SoCal.

The Temples prospered for two decades, becoming one of the wealthiest families in post-statehood LA County. But their luck ran out in the early 1860s. After a series of floods and droughts decimated their cattle stock, Temple decided to sell Rancho Los Cerritos. He and Rafaela moved to San Francisco where he died in 1866, just after selling the Rancho to the Flint, Bixby & Co. firm for $20,000 (about $373,000 today). Rafaela moved to France, to be closer to their daughter Francisca.

The Bixby Era

Like Temple, Rancho Los Cerritos’s new owners were east coasters who moved out west and made their money in ranching and real estate. The Flint brothers, Benjamin and Thomas, left Maine in 1851 with their cousin Llewellyn Bixby, lured by the promise of gold. Within a couple years they had turned to ranching, and purchased 2000 heads of sheep that they drove from Ohio all the way to northern California, the seeds of a ranching empire. Over the next decade, they would start buying up massive tracts of land, mostly divisions of old Spanish land grants in central California. By 1864, the Flint, Bixby & Co. had set its sights on the ranchos of southern California. They grabbed up more than 100,000 acres of land in what’s now Orange county; after they purchased Los Cerritos in 1866, they brought Llewellyn’s brother Jotham on board to manage it. 

Unlike its previous owner Temple, Jotham Bixby, his wife and their seven kids lived at the Los Cerritos Ranch House full time, and Jotham was actively invested in its upkeep (quite literally – he bought half the property with his own company). Sheep were big business for them, and at its height the ranch boasted 30,000 animals, sheared twice a year for their wool. By the late 1870s though, the sheep business was going the way of Temple’s cattle business 15 years earlier, and Jotham Bixby started subdividing, leasing and selling portions of the 27,000 acres, before moving north to LA in 1881. As of 1884, the fledgling town of Long Beach, not yet incorporated as a city, would occupy part of the Los Cerritos rancho; Bellflower, Paramount, Signal Hill and Lakewood all emerged from land that was carved out of Los Cerritos. The Bixby family’s legacy is enshrined in the names of Long Beach neighborhoods like Bixby Hill, Bixby Knolls and Bixby Village. Oh and fun fact: Jotham’s daughter, Fanny Bixby, was one of America’s very first policewomen! 

Return of Llewellyn

There’s a big hole in the history of the Los Cerritos Ranch House from about 1890 through the late 1920s, when the once-proud adobe turned ramshackle through a series of tenants that didn’t care for it properly.  

All that changed in 1930, when Llewellyn Bixby’s son (also named Llewellyn) decided to return to his ancestral home, significantly renovate and modernize the house, and start living there with his family. He hired renowned landscape architect Ralph Cornell (who also designed the grounds of UCLA and the La Brea Tar Pits) to beautify the grounds; Cornell retained the Italian cypress tree from the Temple era, which you can still see today, and the stunning Moreton Bay fig from the late 19th century. It was his idea to add a pond and fountain to the house’s inner courtyard. 

After the younger Llewellyn passed, his family sold the house and surrounding land to the City of Long Beach. It reopened in 1955 as a house museum run by the Long Beach library system, interpreting the history of Rancho Los Cerritos. It still operates as a museum today, though it’s now overseen by the non-profit Rancho Los Cerritos Fundation, in partnership with the city of Long Beach.

Rancho Los Cerritos Today

There’s a lot to unpack at the Rancho Los Cerritos of today. In the house museum you’ll find tools and artifacts from the different eras of the rancho’s existence. There are videos and exhibits at a small visitors center, and if you bring your kids with you, the docents will give you a fun scavenger hunt to keep them occupied. There are spectacular gardens all around, connected by lovingly manicured walkways. The lawn right in front of the main house is a popular place to get married. 

My favorite aspect of Los Cerritos is its connection to so many phases of California history. In a single generation, this land was owned by Spain, then Mexico, then America. The mix of soldiers and traders, carpetbaggers and deep-rooted Californians, farmers and politicians and folks from vastly different cultural backgrounds all tussled to make this land work for them over the years. It’s such a rich history.

Los Cerritos and Preservation

One last strain here to tease out, about the way that museums, preservationists and governments represent and interpret history. Buried deep in the record of Los Cerritos’s application for National Historic Landmark status, pages 92-104, is a heated correspondence between Ellen Calomiris, Museum Administrator for Rancho Los Cerritos, and David Look, a preservation official at the US Department of the Interior. The letters date from 1989-1990, 20 years after Los Cerritos was named a National Historic Landmark.

The correspondence revolves around a proposal by Los Cerritos historians to reverse the alterations made by the younger Llewellyn Bixby in 1930-1931, and restore the ranch house to how it looked in 1866-1881, when Jotham Bixby and his family lived there.

Here’s a letter from Look to Calomiris, dated July 3, 1989:

While we certainly would advocate that the stabilization and repair recommendations made in the Historic Structure Report be undertaken as soon as possible, we cannot support the restoration and interpretation recommendations…

We understand that your purpose is to interpret the 1860s-1880s period of the rancho, and that the current 1930s appearance of the building and grounds makes interpretation of the earlier period difficult. However, the proposed restoration would result in the removal of all of the 1931 changes to the property, which are now historic and appear to have gained significance in their own right. Removal of the 1931 alterations would violate several of the Secretary of the Interior’s “Standards for Restoration” (see enclosed “Standards for Historic Preservation Projects”) which encourage recognition and respect for changes that have taken place over time, and discourage the removal or alteration of historic fabric…We suggest that the City explore other interpretive avenues and themes that would incorporate the 1930s architecture of the building into its presentation to the public. For instance, the earlier periods of the rancho could be illustrated through photography and models. Another theme might be the development of the Mission Revival style in the 1920s and 1930s and its romanticized evocation of the Spanish colonial period.

-David W. Look, AIA, Chief, Preservation Assistance Branch, US Department of the Interior

…and Calomiris’s response, from July 10, 1989:

We suspect that you may not understand the degree to which the building does not currently reflect even its 1931 condition. There is not a single room which represents or interprets the 1931 era, and most every room has been structurally altered in at least some way since 1955. Many internal—and some external—changes have been made to accommodate museum operations, and both the community and city personnel appear not to have considered the 1931 features to have historical significance…

You urge us to follow the stabilization and repair recommendations in the report. However, to save the 19th century historic fabric, these recommendations call for removal of 1931 treatments which you maintain are now equally historic. The plans also call for replacement of the original crosswalls and parlor ceiling in order to meet the city’s earthquake hazard code requirements and deadlines. That would leave us with a building that is neither a representation of the 1870’s, nor one reflecting the 1931 remodel—but we will have “saved” the building! This is preservation, but to what end?

-Ellen Calomiris, Museum Administrator, Rancho Los Cerritos

Elsewhere in the correspondence, Look addresses the possibility that Los Cerritos could be de-designated as a National Historic Landmark, if the restoration work suggested by Calomiris and her team were carried out. Thankfully that never came to pass. But the fact that it was even a consideration says a lot about how the values of historians, preservationists and museums aren’t always in sync – and how those values change over time. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Rancho Los Cerritos’s National Historic Landmark nomination form 

+History (rancholoscerritos.org)

+Fitzgerald, Sarah Wolk: “Rafaela Cota de Temple: Hija del Pais (Daughter of the Land)” (rancholoscerritos.org, 2021)

+Newmark, Marc: “Historical Profiles—I: The Life of Jonathan (John) Temple,”  The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, (March, 1954)