Photo of Municipal Building in San Juan [1930, BPW Annual Report]
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the new American colonial government started undertaking a wide variety of infrastruture projects in the Philippines, including Batangas, to improve the standard living in the country as well as to stimulate economic growth. These projects included the construction or road and rail networks, administrative buildings, schools, athletic fields and many more.
Batangas was among the recipients of many of these projects, which were mainly executed by the Bureau of Public Works and documented in the bureau’s quarterly bulletins and, subsequently, annual reports.
Below, for example, is a photograph of the newly-constructed Municipal Building in San Juan. Previous Bureau of Public Works quarterly bulletins and annual reports had referred to the town as San Juan de Bocboc or just San Juan. In the 1930 edition of the annual report, however, the town was referred to as Bolboc (Bolbok in contemporary spelling), probably in reference to the village from which the municipality grew.
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The San Juan Municipal Building. Image digitally extracted from the 1930 Annual Report of the Bureau of Public Works. |
Notes and references:
1 “Bureau of Public Works Annual Report, Volume 18 No. 1,” published January 1930 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.