One of the "facts" you'll find in every history of Covina is that in 1882, J. E. Hollenbeck sold 2,000 acres of his land in Rancho La Puente to J. S. Phillips for $30,000 where the latter founded Covina in 1885.1 It turns out that's not historically accurate, as you'll soon learn.
Just recently I found this conveyance involving Hollenbeck and Phillips, but it wasn't at all what I was expecting. In fact, when I saw it, it made my jaw drop, because if the accepted origin story of Covina is correct, it shouldn't exist.

Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1885.2
As you can see, in eighteen-eighty FIVE, Hollenbeck and Phillips jointly conveyed 195-3/4 acres in Rancho La Puente to James F. Houghton–trustee of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. of California–to secure a loan to J. S. Phillips in the amount of $40,000. (Put a pin in that for future reference.)
What's significant is that Hollenbeck couldn't convey title in real property he didn't own, so this a clear indication he didn't sell his land to Phillips outright. It appears he only entered into an agreement to sell, and retained ownership until the terms of the agreement were fulfilled. If true, that means Hollenbeck actually remained a "silent partner" in the Phillips Tract all along (or at least until Phillips putatively used that $40,000 to satisfy his indebtedness to Hollenbeck after he obtained the loan in January, 1885.)
It took me a while to find proof of the above claim, but here it is in black-and-white (and yellow!):

The Daily Commercial, September 15, 1881.3
So Phillips not only didn't purchase the land outright, Pflueger and other historians got the year wrong, too. We now know for certain that Hollenbeck was still technically an owner of the "Phillips" Tract, even after he made his deal with Phillips in 1881.
I also recently discovered something else that never made it into the history books. Pflueger1 chronicles the events in J. S. Phillips' life from 1882-1889 in often meticulous detail, but unless one attends carefully, a reader can easily skim past what ultimately happened to the founder of Covina, and even the single sentence devoted to the subject turns out to be a soft-pedaled vaguery of the actual turn of events that Phillips fell victim to in the end.
Quoting from page 204, this is all Pflueger has to say about the cessation of Joseph S. Phillips' association with the town he fathered:
He lost a large segment of his fortune in an investment in a northern California mine and was forced to sell his holdings in Covina and move elsewhere to regain his fortune.1
Well, as Paul Harvey used to say, you're about to find out "the rest of the story."

It was front page news in the June 3, 1889, edition of the Los Angeles Herald.4
First of all, notice there's Houghton and that life insurance company again: the same one that loaned Phillips $40,000 four years before. And apparently, judging by the remaining value of the mortgage, as mentioned in the newspaper article, Phillips had only managed to reduce his debt by $5,000 in all that time.
I suppose technically it was not inaccurate for Pflueger to say Phillips was "forced to sell his holdings," but the legal term "forced sale" is a synonym for foreclosure, which conveys a distinctly more negative connotation. With his equivocal phrasing, Pflueger almost made it sound like Phillips simply sold off his assets and moved on, but the hard fact of the matter was that Phillips had taken out a loan, he defaulted on repayment, and his remaining Covina properties were declared forfeit and seized. (A denouement interestingly similar to the Badillas before him.)
Heretofore, I would wager that not a single student of Covina history alive today was aware of Phillips' actual financial fate, or that Hollenbeck had retained a share of ownership in the Phillips Tract past 1882. (Both were certainly news to me!)
The full text of the newspaper article is transcribed below.