The Story of the Alamitos Mesa
Maybe it was the plentiful water flowing deep within the earth ... or the extraordinary views that reached from the mountains to the sea ... or the remarkable peace that seemed to envelope the land ...
Whatever it was, the wind-swept mesa that we now call Rancho Los Alamitos has drawn people to it for centuries.
The Native Americans were probably the first, establishing Povuu'nga around 500 A.D. Povuu'nga was a sacred ceremonial and trading village.
More than 1200 years later, in 1790, a Spanish foot soldier, Manuel Nieto, received the area as part of a 300,000 acre land grant for his retirement.
Disputes with Mission San Gabriel quickly reduced his holdings to 167,000 acres. His property was further diminished in 1806 when Nieto's heirs petitioned to split the land into five great ranchos. One of those, the 28,500 acres Rancho Los Alamitos, became an outpost ranch of Nieto's eldest son, Juan Jose.
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Abel Stearns (1798-1871) |
In 1834, Governor Jose Figueroa purchased the Alamitos property for $500 (less than 2 cents an acre!), and in 1842, Don Abel Stearns bought the ranch for $6,000. He and his wife Arcadia Bandini Stearns used Alamitos as their summer retreat from Los Angeles.
Stearns was an active rancher, but the great drought of 1862-64 killed thousands of cattle and he lost Alamitos to its mortgage holder, San Francisco financier Michael Reese.
In 1878, John Bixby leased Alamitos and moved his young family into the deteriorated adobe. By 1881, in partnership with Jotham Bixby and 1. W. Hellman, he was able to acquire the property. John and his wife, Susan, planted trees and a garden, and began transforming the worn structure into a home.
John's son Fred, and his wife Florence, moved into the ranch house in 1906. While Florence created the expansive gardens that surround the house today, Fred focused on ranching, business, oil and his passion for breeding majestic Shire horses.
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Fred Bixby died in 1952, and Florence lived at the ranch house until her death in 1961. Seven years later, their descendants gave the furnished house, gardens and six barns to the City of Long Beach to maintain and develop as a regional historic and educational facility.
The history of Rancho Los Alamitos parallels the history of Southern California: the Native American culture, the colonizing imperatives of the mission and rancho systems, the devastation and financial ruin wrought by the droughts of the 1860s, the boom settlements of the 1880s, the discovery of oil, the shift from an agrarian to an urban environment, World War II and its aftermath of housing developments, and the impact of industry, freeways and automobiles. These and many other waves of change have irrevocably altered the destiny of Rancho Los Alamitos and the region. |
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Fred and Florence Bixy with their children in 1911 |
Yet it is the human stories of those who occupied the mesa that have infused Rancho Los Alamitos with its unique spirit. As Florence Bixby wrote in 1936: "It was a feeling of life that had been lived here before ... a thousand human influences ... as though a great river were flowing past, steadily, smoothly ... the continuity of life, that was the secret."
And it still is.
Read more by following this link:
Historical Narrative "Rancho Los Alamitos" by David Lavendar |
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