The Tract, Trials and Tribulations of Joseph Phillips

J. Edward Hollenbeck and Joseph Phillips: the two men without whom Covina would not have existed.

These past six weeks I've been doing a deep dive into Covina founder Joseph Swift Phillips, and I've uncovered many surprising new facts. The subjects are fairly complicated and make for a long, dry read, however, so I thought I'd approach this article differently and start off with a list of my main points and then delve into the particulars afterwards.

I should perhaps note here at the outset that none of the following findings have been described in any previous published history of Covina. This is all new stuff here, especially the legal blockbuster near the end!

tl;dr summary:

• As I stated in a previous article, the real estate deal between Phillips and Hollenbeck for the tract of land which would become Covina took place in 1881, not 1882.

• The 1881 deal was only a contract for deed, not an outright sale, and Phillips may have used real estate instead of cash for his down payment.

• In 1885, Phillips had to borrow $40,000 to pay off Hollenbeck, and the loan was secured by a deed of trust that conveyed legal title from Hollenbeck directly to trustee James F. Houghton. Phillips himself never actually held marketable title to the tract which bore his name.

• Although Phillips was empowered to arrange and negotiate sales, all of the original land purchases and title conveyances in the Phillips Tract from 1885-1889 were brokered and closed by Houghton.

• Phillips ultimately failed to repay his 1885 loan, so in 1889, Houghton foreclosed and Phillips forfeited all of his Covina properties.

• Hollenbeck and Houghton both made big bank on the Phillips Tract, while Phillips himself lost everything.

• In 1894, Phillips sued almost everyone who had been involved with his past land dealings in a last ditch effort to recoup his financial losses.

• In sum, litigation expense was likely a significant contributor to Phillips's financial downfall.

Details and references below.

On AI

Given the pace of change in our electronic world, I'd like to state for the record that I have never used "artificial intelligence" in the production of this blog, and I never will. Every article you read here is the output of my native human intelligence applied to researching a particular topic, or an account drawn from personal experience.

To me, this is not merely a matter of principle or credibility. This blog is all about discovering new facts about Covina history, and AI in its present state is not able to generate novel ideas. It may be able to tell you things that you never knew before, but it cannot create entirely new knowledge on its own. Not yet, anyway. So for my purposes here, AI doesn't have any practical usefulness.

Granted, my reliance on human intelligence also means mistakes will be made, but at least any errors of fact you might find here are not the result of "hallucinations" of the sort that is currently endemic to AI. (Which is to say, I never just "make shit up" like the LLMs sometimes do.) ;-)

All that said, I've been amused the couple of times that someone has quoted a chatbot to me on some aspect of Covina history, and I note that it's lifted virtually verbatim from my blog. So although I have few followers in the realm of organic life, it's at least nice to know the machines are reading my blog and learning things from it. :-)

 

Badillo Mystery Solved?

There's been all kinds of speculation in recent years about the name of Badillo Street in Covina and why it differs from the pioneer family's hereditary Spanish name, Badilla.

Covina's main east/west street was named "Badillo" on the original Phillips Tract survey map in 1884.
Courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society.

I briefly mentioned my own ideas about this controversy at the end of the article about Hollenbeck and the Badillas that I posted back in 2021. I noted that the family themselves appeared to use a terminal –o in their surname on occasion, and theorized that the street was named "Badillo" because that was the name the farming brothers were best known by.

I didn't have direct evidence for either claim until just yesterday, though, when I found this letter published in a newspaper in 1877¹ that was signed, "J. Julian Badillo." This was the first time I'd seen one of the famous coffee-growing brothers apparently using the Badillo spelling himself (and the first I've seen the name of their coffee plantation was "San Isidro Ranch.")

Santa Barbara Daily Press, February 7, 1877.

With that revelation, I then thought about examining the idea of name familiarity, so I did more specific searches on the newspaper archive website to manually tally the number of times the two surname spellings were used, and in which contexts they appeared.

This is what I found:

Book Report

I just read a new novel called "Gone in Time" by F. K. Matthews. It's a story about a young man who mysteriously finds himself transported to Covina in 1960. Quite an enjoyable time travel story, especially if you grew up on the "west side" of town, and particularly so if you were a "gearhead" who loved working on vintage cars. :) The descriptions of places and life in Covina in the Sixties are pretty much spot-on, the characters are very relatable, and it has a unique twist-ending, too. I was really captivated by it, myself. Couldn't put it down! In fact, I can't recall finishing a book of that length in one day before. Definitely recommended! ^_^

Available on Amazon

 

The Issei Fathers of West Covina

Relatively few valley residents today are aware that people of Japanese ancestry played a significant role in the early history of West Covina. During the first two decades of the 20th century, dozens of farmers emigrated from Japan to settle here, owning and working the land, raising families and becoming productive members of the local community.

And what a community it was! Early West Covina was a remarkable assemblage of nationalities. No previous author has stated this specifically, but unlike the parent city,¹ there was no racial separation to speak of in pre-war West Covina. Americans, Europeans, and first-generation immigrants from Japan (termed "Issei") all lived, farmed and participated in society with full freedom of association. There's perhaps no better visual evidence of this societal integration than this photo of Grades 1-3 at West Covina School in 1938. Look at all those happy faces!

Teacher Frances Maxson Sanchez (1900-1999) was the daughter of West Covina's first mayor, Benjamin Franklin Maxson, Jr., and her husband, Juan C. Sanchez, was a great-grandson of founding pioneer John Rowland.²

Tags

Some readers may have noticed that I recently added subject tags to my postings. This is to help people directly access articles related to specific topics. Might be worth bookmarking this page for future reference. (I have!)

Particular attention is called to the New History tag. There you will find facts about Covina history that have appeared nowhere else before. Covina Past exclusives, you might say!

Below are all the tagged subjects, with clickable links for your convenience.