A bath room shortly followed, its installation holding the excited imagination of the children; a little later the house sprouted a wing, containing two bedrooms, “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 marking off the garden beds, and for lining a sixty-foot well and building a large cistern.
From the northern forests of the state he obtained handhewn redwood which he used for the beams, floors and other interior woodwork, and for the twelve-foot fence about the large garden.
The walls of the house were made from the usual large slabs of sun-dried adobe, made on the spot. They were moulded in frames constructed for making nine or twelve at a time; this frame was laid on a level bit of ground and packed with clay-like mud, into which straw had been tramped by the bare feet of the Indians; when exposure to the sun had caused the shrinking away of the bricks from the wood, the frame was lifted and the slabs left for further drying out.
When I was a child there was a pit below the house, near the river where water could be obtained easily, in which I have watched the mixing of the adobe; I saw the bricks made in small quantities for purposes of repair or the building of a new wall.
The house was built with a two-storied central portion a hundred feet long, with two one-storied wings about one hundred and sixty feet in length, extending toward the river. The ends of these were joined by a high adobe wall in which there was a single gate, its heavy wooden doors being closed at night during its earlier history, but seldom during the later period.