Is it worth it?

I'm losing hope this blog is ever going to attract a decent-sized audience. My latest post got only 16 page views in a month. Other articles show a similarly abysmal level of traffic in the last 30-day period.

Lowering my spirits even further is the fact that I've been writing this blog for over 18 years now, and Covina Past still has only 1 follower. On the whole internet, just one person is interested enough in my content here to subscribe to it?

This is disheartening to say the least.

What's to be done? One thing I believe would help my blog gain readership is if the Covina Valley Historical Society were to regularly post links to my articles in their newsletters and socials. It would help even more if the Firehouse Museum were maintained in a manner that allowed its holdings to be used for historical research. They have a treasure trove of printed and photographic material in their trust, but it's completely inaccessible. There's no phone, no email, and it's only staffed for a couple of hours one day a week. Meanwhile, dozens of bound volumes in their archive just sit locked away gathering dust, along with thousands of photos stashed away in envelopes, never to be digitized and thus effectively lost to present and future scholars. This is very frustrating to someone like me who is eager to turn this invaluable storehouse of information into something truly useful.

If I still lived in the Covina area, I could and would get directly involved in the Historical Society and go full activist on the research and education front, but I'm 700 miles away now and have no means to travel, so that isn't an option, unfortunately. So I'm kind of left without hope that any of these things are ever going to change.

And then there's simply the matter of time. I just turned 70 a couple of months ago, so this could very well be my last decade of life, and I really have to ask myself: is this blog a productive use of my remaining years on this earth? Would someone of any age think it's worthwhile to write for such a tiny and apparently indifferent audience? I think the objectively obvious answer is no, it is not.

Consequently, as much as I love Covina and its history, I've decided it's probably for the best that I wrap things up here. I'll continue to do research on my own, and there are a couple more topics in my queue that I've been working on that I feel I owe it to myself to publish on this blog, but after that, I think the time has come for me to move on.

 

Founder Finds

I have a peculiar trait that I call "detritophilia." Whenever I find myself in a place with a long history of human habitation, I will visually scan disturbed pieces of ground looking for discarded bits of everyday life from times past. It's a kind of urban archeology except I don't do any digging. I simply look for objects that are lying on the surface, waiting in plain sight for my trained eye to spot.

Anyway, in 1988, I made multiple trips to Covina to clean out our family home and prepare it for sale. One day while returning from Azusa with packing materials, I decided to kill some time and explore the vacant lot at San Bernardino Road and Hollenbeck where the Phillips House once stood (and the Julián Badilla house before that). Here are the four pieces of historical detritus that I collected that day.

Photo by J Scott Shannon. Scale in inches.

This was pretty easy to identify as the broken off end of an iron prying bar. Upon closer inspection, though, I noticed its shape was distinctly asymmetrical, which suggested to me that it was forged by hand.

Photo by J Scott Shannon. Scale in inches.

This object baffled me for the longest time. My best guess was some sort of wall or ceiling fixture. It wasn't until recently that Michael Schoenholtz suggested that it might be the reflective portion of a candle sconce, and I now think he's exactly right. This, too, appears to be quite old, and hand-hammered. Note in particular how crudely the edges on the reverse side are formed.

Photo by J Scott Shannon. Scale in inches.

Two pottery fragments: the one on the left apparently of glazed porcelain, and the other, glazed red clay pottery. Not much to say about them, except that they're almost certainly pieces of some sort of tableware, and that one's fancy in design and the other is plain.

So, how old are these objects? Obviously they can't be dated precisely, but because the plot of land where they were found was not built upon until 1876, that gives us their earliest likely origin date.

Additionally, the apparent hand-made quality of the metal items makes it reasonable to assume that they are from a time when tools and other hardware were made by and purchased from local blacksmiths rather than being mass-manufactured and sold in stores. Store-bought goods probably became more common after 1890, so that's my best guess for the upper end of the age range.

So, if these items date from the period 1876-1890, they could have belonged to either Julián Badilla or Joseph Phillips. However, I tend to think the cruder-made metal objects are from the Badilla era. That candle sconce, in particular, looks more like a fixture on the wall of a simple farmhouse than the imported mahogany paneling of a mansion.

These finds are all to be donated to the Covina Valley Historical Society.

 

The Founder's House

In the early 20th century, the citizens of Covina all recognized this ornate manse formerly standing at the southwest corner of San Bernardino Road and Hollenbeck Street as the house of the city's founder: Joseph S. Phillips (1840-1905). Despite its past status as a local landmark, over time its origins became obscured, and confusion has arisen in recent years about exactly whose house this was.

Painting by Melbourne Sumpter, image courtesy Glenn Reed/Covina Valley Historical Society.

Two specific facts about the place are undisputed:

• The first house on that site was built by pioneer José Julián Badilla after he and his elder brother Pedro bought the land in 1876.^1,2,3

• In 1882, after Joseph Phillips agreed to buy 2,000 acres of then ex-Badilla land from J. Edward Hollenbeck (1829-1885), Phillips moved into Julián Badilla's former home.^1,3,4

Most latter-day historians have also presumed that this two-storey Queen Anne Victorian is the same house built by Julián Badilla.^1,4 However, could it be that Phillips replaced the original structure with a home of his own? Fact is, we don't know for certain one way or another, because there is no surviving record of who actually built the old landmark, or when.

In this article, I will attempt to answer the "who and when" with information that is now available, specifically maps that were published in the 1870s and 1880s, modern-day photographic and descriptive evidence, logical deduction and parsimony.

Citrus Avenue, 1938

Looking north on Citrus Avenue...

...from Workman Avenue:

...and from Badillo Street:

But when?

Covina Schools Timeline

When I compiled the Covina History Timeline almost ten years ago, I included several entries that pertained to local educational institutions, but the number and scope of those mentions was necessarily limited. This new timeline delves into the history of Covina's schools in much greater detail. Most of the information presented here concerning schools of the postwar era was drawn from a book published in 1996 by the Covina-Valley Unified School District entitled "Centennial 1896-1996." Other references include Donald Pflueger's histories of Glendora (1951) and Covina (1964), Dr. Barbara Ann Hall's Covina (2007), and newspaper articles of the day found in the online archive Newspapers.com. Citations for specific entries are available upon request. Please bear in mind: this timeline is an ongoing work in progress. Corrections, additions, and their supporting documentation are always welcome.

Circa 1850 – "Don Enrique" Dalton sets aside a room on his Rancho Azusa where the children of the upper valley's earliest settlers can learn their Three Rs.

Second Street Park

For the past eight decades, Covina's Second Street has been a rather bleak expanse of asphalt, but look how pretty it used to be! From 1923-1949, Second had a 16-foot-wide median strip^1,2 running from San Bernardino Road south to Badillo that was graced by 48 Queen palms (Syagrus romanzoffiana). They called it "Second Street Park."³

Looking north on Second Street from College Street, c.1940. Photo courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society c/o Powell Camera Shop.

So why was this visually-appealing landscaping done away with? You guessed it: parking.² Initially, the palms were replanted along the sidewalks and elsewhere,³ but eventually all but one of them were removed. This single, solitary palm at the northeast corner of the Badillo alley is now all that remains of old Second Street Park.

Source: Google Street View.

Kind of sad, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if Covina were to re-beautify Second in the 21st century? I can hardly think of another major street in town that is more in need of aesthetic improvement.

References:

¹ Covina Argus, July 28, 1922, p.1.
² Covina Argus-Citizen, April 4, 1947, p.8.
³ Covina Argus-Citizen, June 18, 1948, p.1.