Badillo Mystery Solved?

There's been all kinds of speculation in recent years about the name of Badillo Street in Covina and why it differs from the family's traditional Spanish name, Badilla.

I briefly mentioned my own ideas about this controversy at the end of the article about Edward Hollenbeck and the Badilla brothers that I posted back in 2021. Just yesterday, though, I found this letter published in a newspaper in 1877¹ that was signed, "J. Julian Badillo," which is the first time I've ever seen proof in print that one of the famous coffee-growing brothers actually used the Badillo spelling himself (and the first I've seen the name of their coffee plantation was "San Isidro Ranch.")

Santa Barbara Daily Press, February 7, 1877.

So then I thought, since I'm already on the newspaper archive website, I decided to take pen in hand and manually tally the number of times each spelling was used, and in which contexts they appeared.

This is what I found:

• Total number of unique newspaper mentions of the family as Badilla between 1876-1879: 25
Contexts: Travel, 1; Post office, 13; Legal matters, 9; Agriculture, 2.

• Total number of unique newspaper mentions of the family as Badillo between 1876-1879: 31
Contexts: Travel: 1, Post office, 9; Legal matters, 1; Agriculture, 20.

When a mention concerned legalities–like a land purchase or sale, lawsuit, or deliquent taxes–their name was almost always given as Badilla. But when a newspaper wrote specifically about the family's agricultural enterprises, the -o spelling occurred in print 10x more often than -a. To me, that strongly suggests intent on the part of the brothers to use the name Badillo, at least in business and when it appeared in articles about their crops.

Why the farming brothers apparently chose to use what we'd now call a trade name... who can say? I'm not even saying for sure that's what happened, but examining the numbers of how often one variation of the name occurs versus the other, and in a very specific context, that's how it looks to me.

In summary, Badilla was indeed their true family name, but Badillo was the name they used in the ag business, and the one they were best known by. Admittedly this is still speculation, but at least it's an explanation that has actual verifiable numbers backing it up.

And concerning the street, if you were a city father, and you wanted to honor someone by naming something after them, wouldn't you want to use the name that people were most familiar with? I really don't think it's any more complicated than that why Covina's founder J. S. Phillips chose to name the street Badillo rather than Badilla.

Neither misprint nor misspelling, "Badillo" has always been the street's name from the time it appeared on the very first survey map ever drawn of Covina in 1884.
Courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society.

So what happened to the Badilla brothers after they departed California? J. Julián and Pbro. Pedro M. ended up spending the rest of their lives in Arizona Territory.² Less has been said about younger brother Antonio, though. In 1885, he sold his 100-acre Covina property to Daniel Houser for $12,000, returned to Costa Rica, resumed growing coffee³ ...and became a fabulously wealthy man.⁴

San Francisco Examiner, July 10, 1913.

As you can see in the clipping above, at the time of his death in 1913, Antonio Badilla's multinational estate was valued at $1,500,000: a sum that this inflation calculator says is equal to $48 million today. If true, I think it's pretty safe to say that, after he left Covina, Pedro Antonio Badilla Bolaños went on to become one of the richest men in Central America. That's some happy ending!

 

References:

¹ Santa Barbara Daily Press, February 7, 1877, p.2. (also Los Angeles Evening Express, February 10, 1877, p.3.)
² Badilla Family History page on Facebook.
³ Covina Argus, May 4, 1912, p.20.
⁴ San Francisco Examiner, July 10, 1913, p.3.