Photo of Municipal Building in San Juan [1930, BPW Annual Report]

This photograph is part of a series showing mostly construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins¹ of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.

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.

¹ “Bureau of Public Works Annual Report, Volume 18 No. 1,” published January 1930 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.