Rancho Los Cerritos Historic Site

An Indigenous labourer built this adobe for Jonathan Temple in 1844, and Temple ran as many as fifteen thousand head off it into the hide and tallow trade. Flood and then drought in the early 1860s killed tens of thousands of his cattle and finished rancho California; he sold out in 1866 for twenty thousand dollars. Flint, Bixby and Company put sheep on instead, as many as thirty thousand, shorn twice a year. That trade failed too by the late 1870s, and Jotham Bixby began selling off the ground Long Beach now stands on.

What the plaque says

The 27,000-acre Rancho was once part of an 18th-century Spanish land grant to soldier Manuel Nieto. The Monterey-style adobe was constructed in 1844 and served the Temple and Bixby families as headquarters for large-scale cattle and sheep ranching operations in the 19th century. In the 1880s the land was subdivided for farming and city development.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Domínguez Rancho Adobe — 2.3 mi
  The first Spanish land grant in California contained the whole harbor, and in 1846 fifty Californio lancers turned back three hundred Marines on it.
• The Banning Museum — 5.0 mi
  The man who made a harbor out of an open bay: freight, dredging, the first railroad in Southern California, and a cupola for watching ships.
• Drum Barracks — 5.2 mi
  The Union Army built its Southern California headquarters in a county that had voted against Lincoln two to one, and stabled the Army camels here.
• Puvungna — 5.7 mi
  The Acjachemen and Tongva place of creation: twenty-two acres of open ground on a university campus, still not in the hands of its people.

More markers nearby

• Domínguez Ranchhouse — 2.3 mi
• Site of the Initial United States Air Meet — 2.7 mi
• Well, Alamitos 1 — 3.6 mi
• Hay Tree — 3.7 mi