Reenactment Brings to Life a Christmas Past

There’s a holiday glow over part of Long Beach this week. And not only from the kerosene lanterns and oil lamps being carried during the evening hours through the city’s oldest house.

The real warmth is from the personalized depiction of a Christmas past being reenacted by Tut Campbell, Greg Robson and Bob Dickison.

The three are among 30 costumed actors portraying members of the pioneer Bixby family in a moment in time frozen at Dec. 23, 1878, at the local landmark known as Rancho Los Cerritos.

The unusual reenactment depicts the winter night when travelers from a broken-down stagecoach showed up at the adobe ranch house looking for help and hospitality.

A fictional stagecoach is a fitting vehicle for a make-believe trip back in time at the 159-year-old adobe. And it’s a trip taken each December by volunteers who help bring the past alive through candlelight tours and holiday open houses.

As they always are, this year’s candlelight reenactments scheduled for Friday and Saturday sold out early. But the adobe will remain decorated with Victorian greenery and vintage ornaments throughout December.

It is open without charge from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. A free Christmas open house, planned for 1 to 4 p.m. on Dec. 14, will feature self-guided tours, storytelling and live music.

The stories and reenactments are based on the true-life 19th-century adventures lived at the rancho by Long Beach’s pioneering Bixby family.

At a lantern-lighted dress rehearsal Wednesday night, the role of patriarch Jotham Bixby was being played by Campbell, a Long Beach tires and wheels dealer. He joked about the broken-down stagecoach with brother Marcellus Bixby, portrayed by Robson, who in real life is a building materials salesman.

Family friend Rev. George Hathaway, played by Dickison, a retired oil refinery chemist, joined in the parlor conversation. He spoke of a train trip he had taken that proved to him that railroads were destined to be the transit mode of the future.

Other snippets of the past were being replayed in other adobe rooms by costumed volunteers, such as auto parts counterman Nick Orchard. He depicted a ranch hand who had just hauled in Christmas supplies and was relaxing over drinks and a card game with rancho workers played by Berge Jerijian and Ron Reese.

With its three-foot-thick clay walls, the adobe was headquarters for the Bixbys’ 27,000-acre sheep ranch. During its heyday, as many as 30,000 sheep grazed on fields above the Los Angeles River.

The ranch was initially part of a land grant given to Spanish soldier Manuel Nieto in 1784. Rancho Los Cerritos, or “Ranch of the Little Hills,” was created in 1834 by his daughter, Manuela Cota. Following her death, her heirs sold the land to Los Angeles businessman John Temple in 1843. He raised cattle there for the hide and tallow trade for about two decades.

The Bixby family, which came to California from Maine during the Gold Rush, purchased the ranch from Temple for $20,000 in 1866.

Bixby and his family lived in the adobe until 1881. After that, the rancho was subdivided, with parts of it eventually becoming portions of Long Beach, Bellflower, Signal Hill, Paramount and Lakewood.

Between 1890 and 1927, a series of renters lived in the adobe. By 1930, nearby areas were being developed with homes and with the Virginia Country Club. That year, Llewellyn Bixby remodeled the U-shaped structure -- stabilizing it with reinforced-concrete roof beams that saved it from destruction during the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.

Only 4.7 acres of rancho land was left when the Bixby family sold the adobe to the city of Long Beach, which opened it as a Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine museum in 1955.

But this month, the clock is stopped at Christmastime 1878.

The reenactment begins in the inner courtyard and continues into the ranch hands’ room, the dining room, an upstairs bedroom and the parlor. Those lucky enough to have reserved $6 tour tickets will be led by lantern-bearing guides through the adobe in 7 1/2-minute intervals.

Some roles change during the tours. Long Beach accountant Gary Black will portray Jotham Bixby on Saturday evening, for example.

Because volunteers must be recruited, costumed and taught their story lines, rancho operators say it is not practical to stage the candlelight reenactments more than two days a year.

That’s unfortunate, say those who have seen the reenactments.

“Even if you’re not a history buff, it gives you a sense of what it was like to live during that time period,” said Marsha Jacobs, a Santa Ana floral arts student who took the candlelight tour three years ago.

“The lanterns and candlelight make it romantic. But the rancho shows that life wasn’t easy back in those days.”

On Wednesday night, actors ranging in age from 7 to the mid-70s easily conjured up the old-fashioned feel.

Oil lamps cast gentle shadows over the adobe’s whitewashed dining room walls as Long Beach homemaker Kim Bemowski portrayed a busy Mary Bixby helping pack supply boxes for rancho sheepherders with a friend, Martha Hathaway -- played by flight attendant Dorie Campbell.

High school language teacher Manqi Zhu was rancho cook Ah Ying as he pulled freshly baked pies from the oven and talked of a visit he had taken to Los Angeles’ fledgling Chinatown.

In an upstairs bedroom, volunteers Margie Newell and Linda Midgett of Long Beach and Dana Ferrarelli of Los Alamitos depicted Bixby family members decorating a Christmas tree with candles. Jager Metz, 8, of Santa Monica, and Jessica Erbe, 7, of Cypress, were cast as Bixby children playing with marbles.

The settings and scenarios are authentic, said Steve Iverson, historical curator for Rancho Los Cerritos. Dialogue and events are drawn from Bixby family records, ranging from books and journals to letters and poetry.

“This site has some really good stories to tell,” said Iverson, a Westminster resident who has worked for 15 years at the adobe with 60 volunteer docents and a 250-member Friends of Rancho Los Cerritos group.

Ellen Calomiris, a historic sites officer with the city, said the rancho’s profile is expected to be boosted in 2004 when a lecture series commemorates the adobe’s 160th birthday and the 220th anniversary of the site’s original Spanish land grant.

The series will begin Jan. 25 and continue through May.

And once more, Calomiris promised, the adobe’s walls will talk.

For a video of Rancho Los Cerritos, see latimes.com/surroundings.