Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 7, 1981 

Go on the right day, and Rancho Los Alamitos will gift you with a euphoric experience. A beautifully appointed ranch house up on a hill, surrounded by sun-dappled garden walks and mature trees, well-kept farming facilities, and horses, chickens and ducks walking around. The history runs deep here, and a tour guide can walk you through how the diverse inhabitants of this land have impacted what you see: from Native Americans to Spanish soldiers, Mexican governors to American land barons, on to the landscapers and preservationists, all of whom have shaped the “Ranch of the Little Cottonwoods” into what it is today. And it’s all free.

While Rancho Los Alamitos has had many lives, it arguably achieved its greatest significance during the 90 years it was owned by the Bixbys. Beginning in the mid-19th century, generations of this dynastic family owned and developed vast stretches of land in LA and Orange Counties. The cities of Long Beach, Bellflower, Paramount, Signal Hill and Lakewood all had their start as Bixby property; multiple neighborhoods, streets and parks still bear their name. And Rancho Los Alamitos was one of the central nodes of the Bixby empire.

But like all of the old Los Angeles properties dating back to the rancho era, Rancho Los Alamitos had a long, complex history before the Yankees came west to gobble it up. 

For at least 1000 years, the entire area around Rancho Los Alamitos, including what’s now the Cal State University Long Beach campus, was a Native American sacred site called Puvungna, or “the gathering place.” The site was of great importance for both the Tongva/Kizh and the Acjachemen, another indigenous tribe based in contemporary Orange County. According to Tongva legend, Puvungna was the home of Wiyot, ruler of the first beings, and the birthplace of the god and law-giver, Chinigchinich. The Tongva had a village there, next to a spring, but by the early 1800s the village had emptied out. Many of its residents moved to the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, converted to Catholicism and were forced to work for the Spaniards.

The European era of Rancho Los Alamitos took shape in 1784, when Governor Pedro Fages granted a concession of ~300,000 acres of grazing land to a soldier named Manuel Nieto. Nieto had been part of the Gaspar de Portolá expedition, the first Europeans to explore California’s mainland in 1769-70. Even after the grant was halved after a dispute with the Mission, Nieto was one of the wealthiest men in California by the time he died in 1804. Not that there was much competition. 

In 1834, the 12-year-old Mexican government implemented new laws over land ownership, which capped land grants at ~48,000 acres a piece. So the old Nieto acreage was divvied up into five separate ranchos: Los Alamitos, Las Bolsas, Los Cerritos, Los Coyotes and Santa Gertrudis, each deeded to one of Manuel Nieto’s descendants. His son Juan José Nieto got the 28,500-acre Rancho Los Alamitos, and soon sold it to Mexican governor Jose Figueroa for $500. 

A rich trader named Abel Stearns bought the rancho in 1842 (he would have been familiar with the land, having acted as surveyor for the Nieto family in the 1830s). Stearns was born in Massachusetts but became a naturalized Mexican citizen by the late 1820s, and at age 43, married the teenaged Arcadia Bandini from an important ranchero family. He made his money trading hides and tallow, and running logistics between the ships bringing goods through the San Pedro port, and the ranchos further inland. 

Stearns turned Rancho Los Alamitos into a prosperous cattle ranch, supplying beef to the prospectors pouring into California during the Gold Rush. In the 1850s and early 1860s he amassed tens of thousands more acres of land in LA and San Bernardino Counties, often through auction or foreclosure. Eventually though, the debts he incurred while operating his vast cattle empire caught up with him. And then a major drought in 1863-4 killed off much of his livestock. Stearns was forced to sell Rancho Los Alamitos to financier Michael Reese, who never lived there, but leased it to other ranchers for grazing. 

And then came the Bixby family, riding in from the east with tons of ambition and about 2000 heads of sheep. They’d come west from Maine in the 1850s, part of a huge wave of western migration. In 1866, Llewellyn Bixby and his cousins Benjamin & Thomas Flint bought nearby Rancho Los Cerritos; brother Jotham Bixby lived there with his family, and their younger cousin John W. Bixby ran the sheep raising operation – all the more important during the Civil War era, when cotton was in short supply in the Union states.

The Bixbys leased Rancho Los Alamitos in 1878, and three years later John, Jotham and their partner IW Hellman bought it outright. John moved into the ranch house with his wife Susan and their young son Fred, and spent the rest of his life raising cattle, sheep, cows, pigs and horses there. Cheese-making was apparently a big deal there, too. After John’s death in 1887, the Rancho was split into three, with Susan and her two children getting the portion that included the ranch house, barns and horse stables.

For nearly 90 years, Rancho Los Alamitos flourished under the Bixbys’ watch. After Susan passed away in 1906, Fred Bixby moved in with his wife Florence and their kids, and grew into a formidable rancher and landowner himself, with holdings extending into Nevada and Arizona. He oversaw the expansion of Rancho Los Alamitos into a successful agricultural enterprise, producing hay and barley, sugar beets and alfalfa for the Fred H. Bixby Ranch Company. They devoted much of their land to tenant and truck farming, and used the ranch as a “finishing” ranch for their beef and dairy cattle. 

The discovery of oil at the Alamitos #1 well in Signal Hill, just 10 minutes away, was a huge boon for the family’s finances. The Bixbys began leasing their land to petroleum companies for exploratory drilling, then subdividing the surrounding areas for residential development. Newly flush with cash, Fred spent more time breeding horses. Maybe it’s not surprising that the tennis court next to the front lawn dates from those heady oil-rich days, too.  

By the mid-20th century Rancho Los Alamitos was winding down as a working ranch. The Navy commandeered 84 acres for a hospital in 1940, and another 300 acres were carved out for Long Beach State College (later renamed CSU Long Beach). Fred Bixby died in 1952 and all but 7.5 acres were sold off. The descendants of the Bixbys donated the Rancho to the City of Long Beach in 1968, with the proviso that it be operated as a historic site. It’s been open to the public since 1970. 

Most of the barnyard structures that you see at Rancho Los Alamitos date from 1910-1948, when Fred Bixby oversaw the ranch. West of the ranch house, there are plenty of original outbuildings on site – a foreman’s house, feed shed, chuckwagon, blacksmith shop, milk shed – that kind of thing. Many of these structures were originally located further west, on private land that the Bixbys hadn’t included in their donation to Long Beach. So they were relocated to the present day Rancho Los Alamitos, to give visitors a more complete – albeit more condensed – sense of what life would have been like when this was a working ranch. 

There was once a three-story red barn just west of the ranch house, which John Bixby had hauled over in 1882 from the Civil War Drum Barracks in Wilmington, after purchasing it from Phineas Banning. The barn burned down in the summer of 1947, and was replaced the next year by a smaller horse barn that’s now part of the Rancho Center, where you check in when you visit today. Rows of pepper trees mark the edges of where the old barn once stood. 

For the best material record of the many phases of Rancho Los Alamitos, you need to visit the ranch house at its center. It began as a simple adobe, just two bedrooms, a dining room and a parlor, and likely built during the Nieto era in the early 1800s. Abel Stearns and his wife Arcadia Bandini installed wood flooring, and added a north wing of simple board and batten walls in the 1850s, with staff sleeping quarters, a kitchen and pantry, and a covered front porch.

By the time John and Susan Bixby moved in, the original adobe was dilapidated, and was in use as makeshift animal pens. They set their minds to making it livable, and over the ensuing decades, successive generations of Bixbys remodeled the house in multiple waves. John and Susan added a wooden wing to the south with more bedrooms and an indoor toilet, transforming the house from an “L” to a “U.” John installed new windows and built some of the fine cabinets and wardrobes himself. 

They converted the original dining room into a library, and the original parlor into a billiard room. There’s a great story about John Bixby’s attempt to donate the billiard table to the Long Beach YMCA, which politely declined for fear that it would corrupt the local youth. Susan added a music room to the north, and in the 1920s Fred & Florence Bixby built a second story on the east wing, above the original adobe. 

Visitors to Rancho Los Alamitos aren’t permitted to snap photos or video inside the ranch house, but suffice it to say it would have been a mighty comfortable place to live, capacious but homey. Skylights and exterior windows offer plenty of natural light, and there’s easy access to the outside patios wherever you turn. Where John and Susan stocked their home with Victoriana to remind them of their New England homeland, the later generations collected artifacts from China, Japan and the American southwest. A lot of it is still in the house, mixed in with Victorian decor and furniture. Some 95% of the books in the library were actually part of the Bixby collection.

What sticks most with me about Rancho Los Alamitos is the landscaping around the ranch house. The gardens to the east were the vision of Florence Bixby, who spent the 1920s and early ‘30s beautifying the grounds. When she moved into the ranch house in 1906, there were just four trees surrounding it, including the two mammoth Moreton Bay figs that you can still see on the lawn to the east. By the time Florence’s work was done Rancho Los Alamitos was transformed into a fantasia of flora, including small formal gardens and walkways, designed by some of the great landscape architects of the era: Florence Yoch, Charles Gibbs Adams, Paul J. Howard and William Hertrich (superintendent of the Huntington Gardens). The famous Olmsted Brothers firm designed the Oleander and Jacaranda Walks, fragrant buffers between the Rancho and the quickly-growing city below.

In 1986 the City of Long Beach partnered with the newly-formed Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation to restore the Rancho and develop it into an educational site to benefit the public. The Foundation put together a master plan in 1989 and set about restoring the ranch house, outbuildings and gardens to their early 1900s splendor. As part of the restoration the 1948 horse barn was transformed into the “Rancho Center,” an interactive museum that interprets the Rancho Los Alamitos history, and explains in detail how it intertwines with the region’s history. The project to restore the barns and create the Rancho Center won a Preservation Award from the LA Conservancy in 2014. 

The wonder of Rancho Los Alamitos is how it compresses the whole story of LA’s development into a single site. You’ll find artifacts from the area’s indigenous past – look at your feet as you amble down the jacaranda walk, and you can see bits of sea shells, evidence of a midden used by the Tongva that once lived in the village of Puvungna nearby. You’ll see one of Southern California’s oldest adobe homes, and its many layers of expansion over 150+ years. You’ll find original furniture, books and antiques left behind by its inhabitants, and five of the buildings that contributed to its success as a working ranch. It’s truly one of LA’s great historic sites.

Thank you to Robin Herrera & Lauren Herrera of the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation for their assistance with this post. RLAF has an incredible database of old pictures and documents related to every aspect of the Rancho’s history.

Resources & Recommended Reading

+ “Agreement Delegating Authority for Operation of Rancho Los Alamitos” (December 18, 1985)

+ Brigandi, Phil: “Drought, Debt, and Development: The Story of the Stearns Ranchos” (OCHistoryland.com, originally published in The Branding Iron, spring 2011)

+ Brigandi, Phil: “Orange County’s First Rancheros – Manuel Nieto and Juan Pablo Grijalva” (OCHistoryland.com)

+ Muchnic, Suzanne: “Rancho Los Alamitos unveils wealth of Southern California history” (Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2012)

+ “Music Inspired by Rancho Los Alamitos – Interview on KUSC with the Composer” (VIDEO – RanchoLosAlamitos on YouTube, April 27, 2012)

+ Prosser, Daniel: “SurveyLA: Los Angeles Citywide Historic Context Statement, Context: Spanish Colonial and Mexican Era Settlement, 1781-1849” (LA City Planning Department, 2016)

+ “Protect Puvungna: History” (FriendsOfPuvungna.org)

+ “Rancho Los Alamitos” (The Cultural Landscape Foundation)

+ “Rancho Los Alamitos” (LAConservancy.org)

+ “Rancho Los Alamitos: History of the Site” (rancholosalamitos.org)

+ “Rancho Los Alamitos: Ownership and Occupancy” (rancholosalamitos.org)

+ “Rancho Los Alamitos and the Story of Water” (VIDEO – RanchoLosAlamitos on YouTube, April 28, 2020)

+ Sanquist, Nancy J., Bixby Ranch Company: Rancho Los Alamitos NRHP nomination form

+ Smith, Sarah Bixby: Adobe Days (University of Nebraska Press, 1987 – originally published 1931)

+ “The Story of Oil in California – Signal Hill” (Signal Hill Historical Society)

+ Woodbridge, Sally with Loretta Berner & Pamela Young: “Architectural Narrative ‘Rancho Los Alamitos’” (PDF – via RanchoLosAlamitos.com)