Tags

Some readers may have noticed that I recently added subject tags to my postings. This is to help people directly access articles related to specific topics. Might be worth bookmarking this page for future reference. (I have!)

Particular attention is called to the New History tag. There you will find facts about Covina history that have appeared nowhere else before. Covina Past exclusives, you might say!

Below are all the tagged subjects, with clickable links for your convenience.

Post-War Postcard

Time for another episode of vintage Covina photo sleuthing! Got ahold of another uncommon postcard of Citrus Avenue recently for which I hoped to pinpoint a date.

Post-war view north on Citrus Avenue from its intersection with Center Street.
Click on image for a larger view.

It's unused, so there's no postmark to give us a ballpark estimate. Just eyeballing the cars, though, I could tell it was from the Forties, but when, exactly?

When Was Covina Founded?

For people born in centuries past, it was not uncommon to not know one's precise birthday, and the same applies to historical places, even Covina!

Covina's founder, Joseph Swift Phillips (1840-1905).

Various sources have claimed with authority that Covina's origin date was 1882, 1884, 1885 and 1886. So, which of these is correct? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is... complicated.

The City Motto

In January, 1922,¹ the Covina Chamber of Commerce held a contest for a slogan to represent the city to the broader world. Two months and dozens of submissions later, it was announced that a Mrs. F. E. Wolfarth won the $20 prize with her entry, "One Mile Square And All There."² The official motto as subsequently adopted by the CCoC would change the "One" to an "A,"^3,4 however, thus becoming the saying that a lot of us young latter-day Covinans were taught in school: "A Mile Square And All There."

But let's pause a moment for a fact check. Was Covina actually "a mile square?" Turns out not quite.

Commenting

Blogger for some reason made a recent change in the way the site handles cookies, the result being that readers can now only post comments here using the Google Chrome web browser.

It also appears that replies to comments are no longer supported. So, from this point on, if you have a question about something in one of my posts, please use the Contact Form in the sidebar, then I can reply to you by email.

This thing at the bottom of each page.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but so many things we encounter online are simply beyond our control. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

"Dear Covina."

Received a surprise gift recently. "Words of Gold from Covina" is a little book of favorite quotations by a Who's Who of Covinans of the day. I've since learned that it was published in December, 1910, by the Covina Presbyterian Church,¹ and was printed by the Argus Press.

But inside I found an even bigger surprise: a "lost" poem penned specially for Words of Gold² by Covina's original diva: "Lark" Ellen Beach Yaw (1869-1947).