Covina Farms

Formerly located at 731 North Grand Avenue on the northwest corner with Edna Place, Covina Farms was a shopping staple for many local families for over a quarter century. It began as an open-air produce and meat market in August, 1955,¹ and expanded to a full-service grocery in September of 1956.² Long-time owners Ray and Sumiko Okura bought the store in November, 1957.³

My mom loved Covina Farms. ❤️ She got all our meats there. Not only did they have the best quality in town, their butcher shop had lockers you could rent, then buy meat in bulk and store it in their deep freeze. The fresh fruit and vegetables couldn't be beat, either. My favorite part was the big newsstand where I'd read a Mad magazine or comic book while Mom shopped. 😉

Mr. Okura passed away in February, 1977,⁴ and although I'm speculating here, that could have been what set in motion the eventual end of Covina Farms in July, 1981.⁵ Only a few short months later, Blake Paper Co. took over at 731 N. Grand⁶ and ran a successful business out of that location for many more years. The old building was finally torn down in 2013.⁷ A new Circle K store, gas station and car wash were constructed on the site and opened in 2021.⁷

I wish I had a picture of Covina Farms, but the best I can do is show you this old shopping bag that I found when I was closing up my parents' house in Covina in 1988. (Mom was quite the packrat.) 😊 It's the only memento I have of the friendly little local market where we shopped probably more times than any other.

References:

¹ Covina Argus-Citizen, August 11, 1955, p.3.
² Covina Argus-Citizen, September 13, 1956, p.31.
³ Covina Argus-Citizen, October 31, 1957, p.28.
⁴ Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1977, p.24.
⁵ Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1981, p.207.
⁶ Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1982, p.617.
⁷ Posted comments by Covina residents in the "I Grew Up in Covina" Facebook group.

 

 

Ira Stanton and Kin

The other day, Dave Armbruster of the Covina Valley Historical Society asked if I could help with info about this photo. The caption read, "Ira Stanton Hauling Oranges," and Dave wondered what I could find out about the gentleman.

Built in 1913, the Covina Heights Groves, Inc., packing house was located on the SPRR line just east of the northeast corner of Front and First Streets.
Ira Stanton's brother, Pliny (b.1877), was Manager,¹ and also co-owner of the Stanton grove,² so perhaps Pliny took this picture of his brother atop their wagon.

I discovered a lot about Ira and his kinfolk, but three things stood out as noteworthy:

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Citizen Casad

If you've followed my blog for any significant length of time, you know I enjoy collecting old Covina postcards and learning about the people who wrote/received them. Well, this may not be a postcard, but in terms of discovering someone, I really hit the jackpot here!

To see the Hollywood received postmark on the verso, click here.

The first thing I noticed about this old envelope was its fine-grade Irwindale postmark. (Irwindale in this case being the original Irwindale, i.e. turn-of-the-last-century West Covina, not the modern-day incorporated city to our northwest.) Then I pondered the fancy cursive that closely resembled my grandmother's, and deciphered the addressee's last name as "Casad." Ahh, that's a street in Covina/WC! Could this maybe be the person it's named after? Then, only minutes later, a quick newspaper search introduced me to Mr R. C. Casad, who has turned out to be one of the more remarkable historical Covina personages I've ever had the pleasure to meet.

In our Civics class at South Hills, I remember Mr. Douglas telling us that the framers of the Constitution intended that Congress be comprised of regular citizens elected by the community who would then come to the nation's capital for a two-year term and represent their constituents. Sounded great on paper, but of course, the system we ended up with was career politicians representing their party and themselves over and above anything else. Not so great...

Covina's Roland C. Casad, however, was a throwback to the Founders' ideal, and much more—a common man who sought not only to stand for his district, but who sincerely desired to improve the lives of all the people and bring prosperity to the entire country. To that end, he tirelessly ran for national elected office 11 times from 1932-1948, including 4 times for president.

The Badilla Foreclosure

The story of the Badilla 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 region of Rancho La Puente, and had they not lost their land to foreclosure in 1879, Covina as we know it today would not have been born. J. E. Hollenbeck's lawsuit changed the course of our history, but the passage of time has obscured the events 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 went 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. About 1875, the brothers bought 5,500 acres of Rowland land in Rancho La Puente for $4 an acre. However, being unfamiliar with the area's semi-arid climate, the Badillos failed twice to grow coffee. Julian got 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 as well 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