LBCC Academic Senate Retreat at Rancho Los Alamitos

The college Academic Senate met for a special meeting and retreat today at the historic Rancho Los Alamitos, a colonial rancho that is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. (Check the history lesson at the National Park Service page.)

Here's the main rancho, which is maintained as a museum and educational facility by the City of Long Beach:



Background from Wikipedia:

The history of the 85,000-acre (340 km2) Rancho Los Alamitos is almost a microcosm for the history of expansion throughout Southern California, from the Native Americana cultures to contemporary times.[3] The area was first the location of the major circa 500 C.E. - 1780s Tongva—Gabrieliño sacred cere­monial and trading village of Povuu'nga, now an archeological site.[4] After Spanish occupation the ownership was to change and the boundaries would shrink many times. Situated in the floodplain between the mouths of the ever-shifting Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Ana Rivers, the coastal plain terrain of the rancho is virtually flat rich soil, and was subject to frequent flooding. The rancho building itself is located near Puvunga springs alongside on one of the few small hills, Alamitos Mesa, in the area.

Rancho Los Alamitos was one of five ranchos that resulted from the partition of the original Rancho Los Nietos grant given to Manuel Nieto, a former sergeant in the Spanish army, in 1784 by governor Pedro Fages, coincidentally his former commander.[5] Nieto's grant was not only one of the first three awarded by the Spanish in Alta California, it was also the largest. After Nieto died, his children requested his original grant be partitioned. In 1834, Mexican governor José Figueroa officially declared Rancho Los Alamitos as one of the five partitions.

Out in back of the house is a classic old red barn with a blacksmith's shop:







Some beautiful horses too:





At the main educational exhibition room there's a showroom with a huge map of the rancho on the floor. You can see that the original Spanish land grant stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the San Gabriel Mountains. The history of the rancho is considered a microcosm of California history from colonial times to the present.



There's a huge patio canopy for meetings at the side of the ranch house:



The Bixby family, the last owners of the property, were connoisseurs of fine art. They owned American impressionist works and other fine paintings, and replicas hang inside the house. (Apparently the Los Angeles County Museum of Art stores and maintains the original works.) Out in the gardens I noticed this replica of the famous Nike of Samothrace. I got a kick out of that:



A great day, very educational!