Interesting piece of Covina history:

In Monday’s column, I wrote about Rudy Uribe, who was fixing up a big house on San Bernardino Road and North Larkin Avenue near Hollenbeck Avenue. The circa 1905 house is about 3,300 square feet with barreled ceilings, pocket doors and other cool features.

Turns out the home probably belonged to Daniel Houser or his family. Uribe said the planks used to build the home had a stamp on the back marking them for the Houser home.

Daniel Houser helped invent a combine harvester sometime around 1880 or a little earlier, according to several books about farm history. It was hard to find exactly when.
“Beasts of the field: a narrative history of California farmworkers” by Richard Steven Street said Houser’s harvester needed 14 horses and harvested 16-foot-wide swath.

The book had lots of other details about farming during the era.

Houser eventually ended up in Covina, where he helped town founder Joseph Swift Phillips dig a ditch to bring water to Covina from San Gabriel Canyon, according to the Covina Valley Historical Society.