there were but six actual members, the minister and his wife, the deacon and his wife, Mrs. Mary Scott and Mrs. Jotham Bixby, many other citizens contributed towards it and a lot was secured on the west side of New High Street near Temple and a building was put up. Everything now was complete and the day of dedication approached. The visiting minister from San Francisco came down by boat to Wilmington and was met by the Bixbys and taken over to the Cerritos for the night. The next day they all drove the sixteen miles to the city to go to church. Aunt Margaret noticed a certain constraint in the air and a black eye on the minister. After service she discovered that the afternoon before the minister and the deacon had gotten into a fist fight in the furniture store over a red carpet for the church that the deacon had purchased without authority. Poor minister, he was red-headed. He was so mortified that he resigned and the little church went into a period of inanition. Sometime later the present First Congregational Church was organized and the firster one gave it the church property plus the debt for the red carpet. And I think the debt still existed when I began attending that Sunday School several years later. It was during the interval of non-activity that the Wilmington church was organized and the Cerritos people wended their way thither on Sundays until the Methodist church in Compton, much nearer home, was organized.
The road to Wilmington from the Cerritos Ranch went southwest over the mesa and down across bot
