The June 11 entry in Chris Jepsen’s OC Historical Roundup blog features one of the classic photos of early Los Alamitos, most likely taken in the late 19 teens or early 1920s. I believe this originally comes from the First American OC History photo archives.
You can see why the small western town of Los Alamitos was sometimes used to be a small western town in some of the new movies (okay, at least one, “Band of Blood”, 1919) that were being produced at locations and in nearby Long Beach (at the Balboa Amusement Group Studios at 6th and Alamitos), and also in LA.
Jepsen works for the Orange County Archives and his blog OC Historical Roundup is very entertaining and full of much OC-iana — lots of Disneyland, and Knotts Berry farm trivia – although from our parochial and biased perspective once again the West OC gets short shrift in the allocation of historical articles. (But again that may be because there just aren’t a lot of known photos about the Los Alamitos area.) They apparently didn’t sell many cameras at Felt’s General Store in old Los Alamitos.
In his job with the OC Archives, Jepsen has also overseen getting much of their photo collection on line and available to all (something both the Los Al and Seal Beach museums should consider). One of the photos they have put online is this high quality copy of the original town layout (click to see a larger version). The town layout was done by architect Frank Capitain, who the LA Times cited as deserving the most credit for making the Los Alamitos sugar factory deal happen. The factory was a seven year crusade for Capitain, but after overseeing construction, he disappeared from involvement with the company in 1898. More can be read of Capitain in our article here.
Jepsen’s blog also features a very good set of links to other local history-related sites. It’s a good place to start for any local history buff.