ooms, “No. 1” and “No. 2,” and the moving of dining room and kitchen three times marked the expansion of the home.
The growing habits of the place persist; it is alive. Each time I go back I find some new thing, now a garden, now a modern heating plant skillfully contrived to circumvent the cellarless condition and massive walls, last of all a cactus garden boasting some imported sand to simulate a desert, but crying out for rocks and stones, which are not to be found in adobe soil.
The vision and industry of one little woman made from the dilapidated pile of mud bricks one of California’s most charming homes, whose generous hospitality, continued by her son and his wife, have made the old place widely known. It is a rare thing in this new country to find a house that has been occupied continuously by one family for almost fifty years.
In contrast to this ranch house the one at Cerritos has fallen from its high estate and is now but a shell of its old self. It has long been deserted and has been kept in repair only sufficient to prevent its meeting the fate of neglected adobes, that of melting away under the winter rains.
Little do the many people who daily pass it on their way to Long Beach dream of its former beauty, its gay and busy life.
Don Juan Temple planned and built it about 1844. For it he imported bricks from the East, shipping them around the Horn. They were used in the foundation of the house, for paving two long verandas, for
