Birth Plate

This commemorative plate was gifted to me when I was born. It is one of my most treasured possessions, and also my most personal Covina collectible. Except for my years away at college, it has been on display in a place of honor everywhere I've dwelt my whole life, and as such, it's an everyday reminder of my ultimate roots in the town of my birth.

2024 was a year of difficult losses for me, but in the end, I decided I should not add to those losses by killing off the one thing I love that I have the power to keep alive. So I will resume posting here, even though doing so carries with it neither reward nor recognition. It's a thankless job, but someone has to do it!

 

Is It Worth It?

I'm losing hope this blog is ever going to attract a decent-sized audience. My latest post has 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?

I feel ignored by the Historical Society, as well. When Glenn Reed was their historian, he actively supported and promoted my work, but that came to an end with his death. I'm the only person left now who is doing scholarly research and writing on Covina history, but those who profess to care most about the subject give me little tangible help with source material or gaining readership here.

All this is disheartening to say the least.

And then there's 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 days 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.