Photo © John Divola

history continued

Over the years, the land has also been home to Spanish and Mexican settlers. The first of these settlers, Manuel Nieto, received the 300,000-acre Los Coyotes land grant in 1790. Nieto’s heirs divided the land in 1833, creating Rancho Los Alamitos, a 28,500-acre ranch that was soon sold to Mexican governor, Jose Figeroa. The land then passed into the hands of Don Abel Stearns, a businessman originally from Massachusetts who had married into the prominent Bandini family. As a signor of the California Constitution, Stearns was also one of Southern California’s few representatives in the legislative assembly. Stearns used the ranch for raising cattle, which suffered badly in the droughts of 1862 to1864. Overextended on credit, Stearns lost the ranch to financiers in 1865.

By 1881, Jotham Bixby and his partners had purchased both Rancho Los Cerritos and the neighboring property, Rancho Los Alamitos. The Bixby family had traveled to California from Maine during the 1848 gold rush. As Jotham’s cousin, John Bixby and his wife, Susan, settled at Rancho Los Alamitos, their eastern sensibilities guided the development of the properties. They installed white picket fences, eucalyptus trees, honeysuckle vines, bananas and extravagant ornamentals, and rows of pepper trees in an effort to transform the vast open landscape into an ordered Victorian ideal of appropriate borders and boundaries. Based on photographic evidence, the pair of Moreton Bay Fig Trees (Ficus macrophylla) was likely planted by Susan Bixby between 1887 and 1890, shortly after her husband's death.