Rancho Los Cerritos: The 1844 Adobe at the Heart of a Cattle Rancho

What Is Rancho Los Cerritos?

Rancho Los Cerritos is a historic adobe in Long Beach, California, built as the headquarters of a Mexican-era cattle ranch. Its name means Ranch of the Little Hills. The house is a two-story Monterey-style adobe, and the site now operates as a nonprofit museum that teaches the history of the rancho and the region around it. The history page of Rancho Los Cerritos lays out the story from the Tongva homeland to the present.

Before the Rancho: Tongva Homeland and the Nieto Grant

The land first belonged to the Tongva people, also called Gabrielino after Mission San Gabriel. The museum notes a village named Tevaaxa'nga near the later rancho, where people gathered acorns, seeds and berries, fished and hunted small game. After Spanish colonization many Tongva were moved to nearby missions. The Tongva remain in the region today.

In 1784 the Spanish king granted about 300,000 acres to Manuel Nieto, a former soldier from Sinaloa, as a reward for service and to encourage settlement. A dispute with Mission San Gabriel cut the grant in 1790, though Nieto still claimed about 167,000 acres. After his death in 1804 his children inherited. His daughter Manuela Cota received about 27,000 acres, the part known as Los Cerritos, where she and her husband built at least two adobes and raised cattle and crops.

John Temple and the Cattle Era, 1843-1866

John Temple, a Massachusetts-born trader, bought the rancho from Cota's heirs in December 1843. Indigenous laborers built the existing two-story adobe in 1843 and 1844, and it served as the cattle ranch headquarters. The museum says Temple ran as many as 15,000 cattle and made money from the hide and tallow trade. The Gold Rush that began in 1848 pushed up demand for beef in Northern California.

The 1850 census recorded more than 30 residents at the ranch, many of them Indigenous, including a mayordomo, or ranch manager. That count is a useful reminder that the adobe was a working center, not just a family home.

From Cattle to Sheep: The Bixby Years

Drought forced Temple out. He sold the property in 1866 to Flint, Bixby and Company for $20,000. Thomas and Benjamin Flint and their cousin Lewellyn Bixby had been raising sheep in Northern California since the 1850s. Jotham Bixby, Lewellyn's brother, managed the southern ranch from the adobe and lived there with his wife Margaret and seven children.

Up to 30,000 sheep grazed the ranch and were sheared twice a year for wool. About 30 people lived on the property, including domestic workers and laborers such as Ah Ying, who cooked and did laundry. By the late 1870s the Southern California sheep business was declining, and the Bixbys leased or sold parts of the land.

A Rancho Becomes a Region

Selling and leasing land turned the rancho into towns. Long Beach was laid out in 1884 on the rancho's southwest corner and incorporated in 1887. The museum lists Downey, Paramount, Signal Hill, Bellflower and Lakewood among the cities that grew from former rancho land. Dairies and farms growing beans, barley and alfalfa filled the countryside.

The adobe housed tenants, many of them farm and dairy workers, and ran as a boarding house from 1906 to 1919 under Ramona Lopez Garcia. The Virginia Country Club opened next door in 1921, giving some tenants work. Neglect took its toll until the 1929 purchase by Llewellyn Bixby Sr., whose renovation added a new roof, plumbing, electricity and fireplaces.

Visit Rancho Los Cerritos

Today the site offers exhibitions, programs and historic interpretation in Long Beach. The Office of Historic Preservation lists it as California Historical Landmark No. 978, and general background is also on the Wikipedia article on the ranch house.

For more on how ranches like this shaped the beef business, see the ranching section of farm.FM and a farm.FM story on California rancho cattle history.