The Badilla Foreclosure

The story of the Badilla brothers and their coffee venture in the 1870s is the genesis chapter of Covina history. The families of Julian and Antonio Badilla were the first to settle the north regions of Rancho La Puente, and had their pioneering enterprise been profitable and all debts duly paid, Covina and West Covina would never have existed. Cities would certainly have been established here, but they'd be quite different in name and form had the Badillas not been dispossessed by J. Edward Hollenbeck's foreclosure of 1879. That legal action changed the course of our history, but the passage of time has obscured the circumstances and people involved. Long assumed lost, I recently found the official court records for Hollenbeck vs. Badilla et al., and what they reveal will significantly broaden our understanding of Covina's past.

The court case that set the stage for Covina's birth.
Source: Los Angeles area court records, 1850-1911, Call number: mssLAACR, Item number: 05091, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Because this article is rather lengthy, I'm going to begin with some tl;dr bullets of my principal findings:

• Contrary to legend, the Badillas did grow coffee here, and wheat in abundance. Their only failure was financial.

• The old story also said Antonio Badillo was a debtor landowner whose mortgage was foreclosed, and that entire characterization was false.

• The Badillas did not use any of their own money to buy the land in Rancho La Puente. Instead, the Badillas and Rowlands arranged a seller-financed mortgage for the $45,000 purchase price.

     —The down payment of $15,000 was borrowed from the Commercial Bank of Los Angeles.

     —The $30,000 balance was financed with two one-year-term $15,000 promissory notes.

• Plaintiff Hollenbeck was not the original mortgage holder. Rather, he purchased the Badillas' delinquent mortgage from the Rowlands, then foreclosed.

• Hollenbeck did not buy the former Badilla land at the Sheriff's auction, he was granted title to it as payment-in-full for the court's decree.

• Two future California politicians were involved with this case. The judge was a member of the influential Sepúlveda family, and the Badillas' defense attorney would go on to become a United States Senator.

The Badillo Legend

In my 2021 article about Hollenbeck and the Badillas, I presented proof that several elements of the familiar Badillo story were untrue. Now, after years of further research and studying these newly-discovered court records in particular, I'm more certain than ever that the narrative once considered historical fact long ago crossed over into the realm of fiction.

The most complete telling of the Badillo legend is found in Donald Pflueger's Covina (1964), and can be summarized as follows:

Julian and Antonio Badillo were wealthy Costa Rican plantation owners who met Hollenbeck when he lived in Central America. Hollenbeck convinced the Badillos to leave Costa Rica and grow coffee in southern California, where they bought 5,500 acres of Rowland land in Rancho La Puente for $4 an acre. Unfortunately, being unfamiliar with the area's semi-arid climate and its relative lack of rainfall, the Badillos failed twice to grow coffee. Julian became discouraged and left, but Antonio stayed and borrowed large sums of money from the Los Angeles bank of which Hollenbeck was principal stockholder. Antonio tried growing other crops, but he failed at that, too, and defaulted on his loan. The bank foreclosed on Antonio in 1879 and Hollenbeck purchased all the former Badillo land for $16,692. Then in 1880, Hollenbeck deeded 100 acres back to Antonio as a gift.¹

For more than a half-century before and after Pflueger's book, this was considered settled history.

Real Facts Emerge

In 2011, however, descendants of Julian Badilla discovered their genealogical connection to his 1870s coffee experiment in Rancho La Puente, and new historical facts came to light.

The First Settler in West Covina, 1904

It may be difficult to believe, but a section of the East San Gabriel Valley that is now home to about a hundred thousand people was basically uninhabited until 1904. Before then, the land south of today's Interstate 10 between the San Gabriel River and Glendora Avenue in West Covina was not yet irrigable, so the area lagged behind Covina in terms of development by almost two decades. At the time, the land was still part of "Lucky" Baldwin's division of Rancho La Puente, and nothing much went on there except for a few cattle grazing on the wild wheat.

In 1904, though, Baldwin started subdividing this portion of his ranch, and the first tract was surveyed in March of that year.¹ H. T. Cotton bought the 810-acre subdivision six months later for $121,500² and named it "El Monte Walnut Place."³ Not because it was in El Monte (it wasn't—that was just the closest town then), and not because there were walnuts being grown there, either—there weren't any yet—but the soil and lay of the land seemed perfect for them, if only someone could find a way to water the trees.

Then, just three weeks after Coffin bought Walnut Place, he made his first sale to a gentleman from actual El Monte named Robert E. Dancer. The property was described in the newspaper as "thirty-three acres...about one-half mile north of Bassett Station."⁴ Mr. Dancer then drilled for water and found a gusher of it at a relatively shallow depth. Word got around, and before you knew it, a small land rush ensued, and the district known as "Walnut Center" was born.⁵ And since Walnut Center was the immediate forerunner of today's West Covina, local historians have long pointed to Robert Dancer as its first settler.

What nobody in later years really knew, though, was the precise location of Dancer's pioneering farmstead. (A "half mile north of Bassett Station" is a clue, but far from an exact one.) Over time, many plausible educated guesses have been put forth, but the actual location of Dancer's ranch has remained a mystery for decades.

Now because I've had really good luck lately finding old deeds with the legal descriptions of many pioneer lands in Covina, I thought I might try to find Robert Dancer's, too. Fortunately, copies of those deeds are relatively easy to obtain from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's Office in Norwalk. (Also fortunately, even someone who lives 700 miles away like me can place an order online and get them, too.)

Well, just today, I got the deed, and now we can tell exactly where Robert Dancer's ranch was! The legal description is as follows...^1,6

Covina Wikipedia Article

Spent the last 5 days working on improving the Wikipedia article on Covina. For years, the History section of that page has been the single worst source of misinformation about Covina's past on the whole internet. It was the exact opposite of what it should be, and an absolute disgrace to anyone who really knows or cares about the details of Covina history. The references cited were very weak, too; in almost every case they weren't authoritative sources at all, just websites that repeated the same distortions of events we've been told all our lives.

So I finally got fed up and decided to basically start from scratch and make the History section the absolute best quick source of information about Covina's bygone days that inquiring minds can find anywhere.

I didn't edit the whole History section, though. There's still stuff at the bottom that needs tidying up or moved to other sections. But paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 are all "New and Improved!" by Yours Truly. Have a look!

Click on the image go to the History section on Wikipedia.

And here are the new references I cited. You'll notice almost all of them consist of primary source material, like original deeds and newspaper reports written at the time the historical events actually occurred. So many definitive references here!

Click on the image go to the References section on Wikipedia.

I know I should have done this a long time ago, but editing Wikipedia is no simple task. It can be pretty intimidating, and exhausting, too. So 5 days of it is quite enough for me, at least for now. *whew!*

 

Compromise Line Road

I hope my dozen or so regular readers will pardon me if I write about someplace other than Covina just once. ;-)

Although I was born and raised in Covina, I lived my first five years on East Foothill Boulevard in Glendora, so consequently, the history of our neighbor to the north is a natural area of interest to me.

The subject is not far out of bounds geographically, either, as both Covina and Glendora share partial origins in a historical Mexican land grant called Rancho San José Adición (aka Rancho Addition to San Jose) which just happens to be the broader topic of this article. Most of Covina's Charter Oak neighborhood lies within Adición's borders, so I'm not really straying too far afield here.

Anyway, even as a child, I had a keen interest in roads and maps which really took off after I discovered my dad's Renie Atlas around age 12 (same time as my interest in Covina history, hmm!). Probably not long after that, the name of one street in particular from my Glendora years aroused my curiosity: "Compromise Line Road." Always wondered what that meant. Somewhere in my early readings of local history, I did learn that it involved a dispute over a northern boundary of Rancho Addition to San Jose, but I never could find out much more than that.

Compromise Line Road in Glendora. Source: Renie Atlas of Los Angeles City and County, 1965 edition.

Recently I was contacted by an old classmate who asked about Compromise Line, and desiring to know more than the basics I'd heard long ago, I decided to do a deep-dive into the subject. Obvious first stop reference-wise was Donald Pflueger's Glendora (1951), but unfortunately his mention of Compromise Line Road was so nonspecific as to be no help at all. Then I searched the newspaper archive, and that was a similar dead-end.

Changes

Although the sometime long gaps between posts might make it appear I'm only doing this part-time, the truth is that even if I'm not actively working on a new article, I'm involved with some aspect of this blog every day. I'm always trying to improve it and make it the best it can be. Whether it's browsing the newspaper archive looking for new material, fact-checking, correcting errors, or making an older post more informative or readable, this is basically my full-time job.

Consequently, an article you read 2 or 3 years ago (or even 2 or 3 weeks ago) might have been altered significantly since. The following is a list of those changes—from major ones to minor—and in reverse chronological order.

Important revisions: (i.e. re-reading highly recommended)
• Remembering Bob Ihsen, Mark Thiel and Dave Rogers—Added two more recent deaths and changed the title.
• Badillo Mystery Solved?—Lots of wording changes, style improvements, and a re-stated conclusion.
• When Was Covina Founded?—Some important date changes and clarified wording.
• Covina Hills Road—New intro, facts, conclusion, and map.
• The Ruddock Mansion—Many new historical details!
• Oak Canyon Road—Rewritten basically from scratch. (I'm really pleased with this one. Definite improvement!)

New post images:
• The Hollenbeck Palms—Added another 1906 postcard view, this one looking south from San Bernardino Road.
• Italia—Added a photo of E. R. Richmond, Italia Cook's father.
• Original Covina Landowners—Corrected a couple of errors in the parcel map.
• Citrus Avenue, 1938—Added a view of the 200 block of North Citrus.
• Covina's Old Neighbors—New map with adjusted labels for Walnut Center and the Hollenbeck Ranch.
• Hollenbeck and the Badillas—Corrected the southern boundary of the Badilla Tract on the 1877 map.

Minor updates:
• The Tract, Trials and Tribulations of Joseph Phillips—Some wording and style adjustments.
• Untold Stories of Hollenbeck and Phillips—Same as above.
• Mayors of Covina—One missing name added to the list.
• Old Covina High, 1961—Corrected the date that the campus was razed.
• Covina Valley Panorama, 1930—Changed the year the photo was taken, the year Lark Ellen bought her Cameron Avenue estate, and some photo label IDs.
• Driving Around the Groves—Made the description more readable.

Always being updated:
• Covina History Timeline—Now over 200 entries!

Due for a complete rewrite:
• The Baptist Seminary—I really must do better than this.

Might actually be a good idea if I made a list of changes every few months, just so everyone can stay right up to date with the greatest Covina history blog there ever was!

 

Covina in the Aughts

Citrus Avenue again, only this time about a half-century earlier. This photo was fairly easy to date, and very precisely, too.

Looking north on Citrus Avenue from Badillo Street, Covina, January, 1907. Clarence Tucker, photographer.
Click on the image to view an enlargement. Photo courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society and Powell Camera Shop (RIP).

Even before looking anything up, on the basis of a past search, I knew this picture had to be taken between 1903-1909 due to the presence of Franz Richter's bicycle repair shop in the far distance near Citrus's intersection with College. But, the obvious clincher was the banner hanging over the middle of the street. It reads: