Abel Stearns was an American trader who came to the Pueblo de Los Angeles, Alta California in 1829 and became a major landowner and cattle rancher and one of the area's wealthiest citizens.

Rancho Los Alamitos takes its name from an 1834 Mexican partition of the 1784 Rancho Los Nietos, a Spanish concession, covering an area in present-day California's southwestern Los Angeles County and northwestern Orange County. Los Alamitos means the Little Cottonwoods or Poplars in Spanish, after the native Fremont Cottonwood trees there.