The Los Alamitos ranch house is
still there. The Rancho Los Alamitos site
dates your photo to 1887. Note the water tank with the brick "cool house" beneath it at the rear of the adobe. Abel Stearns built the bunkhouse wing on the left.
Los Alamitos was
another one of Abel Sterns holdings
e_r. It, and Los Cerritos (founded by John Temple), both eventually became the property of members of the Bixby family (Alamitos in 1878).
losalamitoshistory
There are many accounts of the devastating drought of the early 1860s. This
LAT article gives a short one.
Sarah Bixby Smith gives a charming account of the history of the Cerritos and Alamitos ranches in "Adobe Days". It may be found
here, starting on page 59 and continuing after. She also writes about the drought and notes that Alamitos was the summer retreat of Arcadia Bandini Stearns and Abel Stearns.
The Nieto family built the original four-room, reed-roofed Alamitos adobe to house their vaqueros (and their horses) on the hilltop
near the location of Povuu'nga, and its wonderful springs, ca 1804. The Nietos sold the ranch to General Figueroa in 1834 for $500. Abel Stearns bought it from Figueroa in 1840 for $5,500. Although the house has been extended in all directions, the adobe remains at its center, getting a frame second story in 1926.
ETA, Michael Reese, who did Stearns out of Los Alamitos, deserves a post of his own. He was known as the "millionaire miser".
(Stearns mortgaged Los Alamitos to Reese for $20K to pay for the Arcadia Block's bricks, but then the drought happened and the ranch was lost.)
-googlebooks
There's a little bio
here
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