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:

Citrus Avenue in the Fifties

Here we have two nice, detailed mid-century views of Covina's busy Citrus Avenue. The photos are undated, but examining certain clues, I think I can come up with some pretty good educated guesses as to when they were taken.

In this first one, the newest car I see is that 1952 Ford Convertible just left of center. That model was introduced in Fall, 1951. However, the photo has to have been taken later than September, 1952, because that's when Faye's Maternity Shop to the left of the Ford opened at 111 North Citrus,¹ and that place does look essentially brand new here. So, 1952 seems like a safe bet for this view.

Looking north on Citrus Avenue from Badillo Street, Covina, 1952.
Click on the image to view an enlargement. Photo courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society and Powell Camera Shop (RIP).

(As an aside, I like how several kids evidently felt comfortable leaving their bikes parked on the street while they went to a show at the theater.)

Packing House Ladies, c.1900

Also found these pictures on the Huntington Digital Library site last night. Actually I've seen thumbnails of these pics many times before, but I never took a real close look at them until now. I was more than a little surprised by what I saw...

I knew it was common for women to work in these fruit packing houses, but I did not know they did so dressed in such fancy, fashionable finery!

Workers in the A.C.G. Packing House, Covina, c.1900. C. C. Pierce Photography Collection.
Courtesy of The Huntington Digital Library, San Marino, CA. Link to full-res image.

Two Home Towns

Here's something I never thought I'd see: a postcard sent from McKinleyville—my home town of the last quarter-century—to the home town of my birth, Covina, back when both burgs were basically backwoods backwaters that no one ever heard of.

"Ethel" mailed this postcard to "Elvin Gilmore Esq." in Covina in 1909. The somewhat cringe novelty side can be viewed by clicking here.

Let's see if we can figure out the connection between these two home towns of mine!

Facebook Page

I decided to give social media a try and create a Facebook page to hopefully boost this blog's readership. Check it out!

Covina Past on Facebook

Presently, I plan to populate the page with short teasers to my blog's "greatest hits," some of the more interesting vintage photos of Covina I've collected, and links to new articles as they appear here. I'll still update the Twitter/X account with those same new article notifications, but that's about all that site was ever good for. I doubt my blog got a single new reader going that route.

In other news, I've been working on multiple different topics for new posts lately, which unfortunately is actually proving to be more of an impediment to my productivity than anything else. I really should try to stick to just one subject at a time. That's the way I've always been used to working, anyway.

More to come soon! And do please Like and share the new Facebook page! This blog needs all the help it can get. :-)

Old Neighbor Remembers

I'll be frank—I don't generally care for oral histories. Reason being, people's memories of past events tend to be embellished or even just plain mistaken; my own being no exception. However, every once in a while, I chance upon an oral account that's really interesting and even compelling in its particulars, and this one—published for the city's 51st anniversary commemoration—is one I believe worthy of historical preservation, in spite of its anonymous authorship. So, with no further ado...

From the Covina Argus of October 18, 1935:

The Hollenbeck Palms

Recently, I added this very early C. W. Tucker photo postcard to my Covina ephemera collection.

Click on the image above to view a clean enlargement.

Although the view looks very different today, and the palms are way taller now, I doubt someone who grew up in Covina would have too much difficulty recognizing where this picture was taken.

But, just in case not, we are looking north on Hollenbeck Avenue from only a few feet north of its intersection with Badillo Street.

And the year? Well, let's play history detective and see what we can come up with!

Covina Past at 100

For this blog's 100th post, I thought a little retrospective might be in order. There've been quite a few changes here at Covina Past since I created this account in 2012. Suffice it to say, it's a very different site now versus what it used to be.

Lysle Writes Home

Once upon a time, a young man named Lysle C. Ummel¹ visited Covina, and while he was here, he bought four picture postcards of the place and sent them back to relatives in Fremont, Nebraska.

Lysle must have mailed them all together in an envelope, because they have no postmarks and thus are not readily datable. However, various clues in the photo of Citrus Avenue made it possible for me to determine that particular picture was taken in 1919.

The familiar view below looking north on Citrus from Badillo. Lysle went on to become an electrical engineer,² so that perhaps explains his pointing out the precise location of the Edison office at the time.

Click on the image to view an enlargement (and click here to view Lysle's message on the verso).

So how did I figure out the year? Let's start out with that blade sign on the Chapman-Workmen building at left. Turns out that "Winder & Jones" were in business at that location from 1919 to 1926,³ so that narrowed the range of possible dates right away. The Covina Theatre isn't there across the street yet, so that narrows things even further to 1919-1921.⁴ But the clincher was the license plates, as 1919 was the last year between 1919 and 1921 that California plates were white.⁵

Here are the other two postcards with white borders, which I feel safe in assuming are also from 1919.

Italia

You're about to make the acquaintance of a remarkable woman who, as you'll see, merits a far more prominent place in Covina history than the mere footnotes she's been relegated to in the past...

As has often been the case, my initial inspiration for an article was a postcard. This particular specimen first attracted my interest because of the handwritten inscription indicating the house owned by Mr. Clapp, the druggist, from whose store came this antique medicine bottle: the subject of one of my earliest posts here.

View looking southwest along the west side of the 200 block of North Second Street, Covina, c.1908. "Rose" mailed this hand-colored M. Rieder postcard from Lordsburg (La Verne) on January 2, 1908. Click image to view an enlargement.

The Clapps were an important family in early Covina, and I'll have more to say about them later, but the actual main character in my present story is Mrs. Clapp's mother—Mrs. Italia Cook—who lived in the big house at far right.

The published histories barely mention Italia, but she was easily the most propertied and most philanthropic woman in Covina at the turn of the last century, and now here, at long last, this pioneer-era force of nature is going to get the full recognition she's due.