Great Change at Arbon: the wheat harvest of 1913

In the fall of 1913, the first harvest since Arbon, Pauline and Crystal had passed from Oneida County into the new Power County, the American Falls Press followed the valley's wheat from the threshing machines to the railroad. In January 1914 it summed up the year in a short item headed "Great Change at Arbon."

Stubble fields and a co-operative

On Saturday, September 6, 1913, a party of American Falls businessmen went to Arbon for the meeting at the Central school that organized the valley's telephone company, as told in the first telephone line. The Press of September 11 reported "miles of stubble" and estimated that "the wheat crop of the valley will aggregate very nearly half a million bushels." Getting that crop to market, it said, was one of the valley's grievous problems:

... the cost of getting his crop to the railroad amounts to about twenty-five cents per hundred pounds, yet the people are in a prosperous condition. With good railroad facilities the Bannock valley would certainly develop into one of the richest farming districts of the northwest.

Bannock Valley was the older name for Arbon Valley. At sixty pounds to the bushel, the haul cost about fifteen cents a bushel.

That afternoon in American Falls, the county's five locals of the Farmers' Society of Equity joined in one county organization. The society, the Press had explained the week before, pooled its members' crops and bought supplies in large lots, for better prices and mutual saving. D. B. Ripley and L. B. Evans, whom the paper called prominent Arbon farmers, came over for their local. T. O. Phillips of Crystal was elected vice-president, and one director was an Arbon man, probably Evans, though the name is hard to read in the digitized page. "The company will handle grain and potatoes this coming fall," the Press reported.

Dry farmers for Tulsa

On September 26 the Idaho Republican of Blackfoot reported that Governor Haines had named thirty men "prominently identified with dry farming," and eleven women, to represent Idaho at the International Dry Farming Congress and the International Congress of Farm Women at Tulsa, Oklahoma, from October 27 to 30. Dry farming meant growing grain without irrigation. The lists included "Joseph Arbon, Arbon," and "Mrs. Joseph Arbon, Arbon." They were almost certainly Joseph N. Arbon, then bishop of the Arbon Ward, and his wife Lizzie. His family's account credits Joe and his father with bringing summer fallowing to the valley. No report found says whether the Arbons made the trip.

Hauling it out

On Tuesday, October 7, L. B. Evans was in American Falls again. He was Ren Evans, "one of the real live boosters for Bannock valley," as the paper put it, and it reported:

The close of the threshing season is drawing near and as soon as that work is finished hauling the crop to market will be taken up in real earnest. Of course quite a little wheat is coming out of the valley now but in comparison with the way it will flow out when everybody ... gets to hauling, it will be as Rock Creek is to Snake river, according to Mr. Evans' statement.

That afternoon the Equity's county board voted to open an agency at the Michaud siding on the railroad, to buy grain and sell hay and coal, with T. O. Phillips in charge. A week later the Press reprinted a Pocatello Tribune item in which Harry C. Wones, the county clerk, said the elevators and warehouses at American Falls were filling as fast as farmers could haul grain in from Rockland valley, Neeley, Arbon and other parts of the county.

On Tuesday, October 21, J. E. Keeler was in town, having threshed "what he considers a bumper crop," the Press reported: 4,300 bushels of wheat, from an acreage the scan does not show, and 1,500 bushels of dry-land oats from twenty acres. The next day David Daniels and another Bannock Valley farmer reported the farmers "hauling out as rapidly as possible."

Not every farm did as well. George Andersen, writing in 1967, remembered that the fall he and his brothers bought their own threshing machine, which the Andersen family history dates to 1913, their crops were "not too good." A trip to Michaud or to Malad took three days, and with no houses or meals at Michaud the men carried feed, bedding and food, sometimes in below-zero weather, as he tells in his own account.

Counting the crop

On January 15, 1914, the Press printed its summing-up:

A single township in Arbon valley last year produced 400,000 bushels of wheat. Six years ago there were not to exceed ten settlers in that township, and the grain producing qualities of the soil were but little known.

The rest of the column, scrambled in the digitized page, praised the valley's "first class men and women" and credited "the enterprise of the people who have made this great change possible." The paper did not name the township. Families had lived on the Arbon floor since the 1890s, but much of the valley's land was taken up only after the American Falls campaign for settlers in 1908, as the Arbon family page tells.

The same day the Logan Republican reported that Bishop W. F. Kowallis of the Meadow Ward, at the valley's north end, had come to Logan on Equity business. Dry-farm wheat, he said, had averaged about 23 bushels an acre, and the valley had raised 300,000 bushels. Its greatest setback was the want of a railroad: "In the absence of railroad facilities, some of the farmers are compelled to haul their grain twenty-two miles to market."

The three counts do not agree. In September the Press expected nearly half a million bushels from the whole valley; in January it credited 400,000 to one township; Kowallis gave 300,000 for the valley. None says how the count was made.

The next year brought frost; George Andersen remembered the family's whole wheat field frozen on the morning of June 14, 1914, as told in the June frost. Even so, Gordon Williamson, who received wheat at Michaud for the Inter-Mountain Milling Company, told the Press in February 1915 that Arbon valley farmers had shipped "fifty-six carloads of wheat through his warehouse." In January 1916 the Salt Lake Tribune called the valley "a tract of 100,000 fertile acres, one-half of which is in wheat," producing about a million bushels a year, and reported preliminary work toward a railroad into it. The first grain warehouse tells how grain buying came to Pauline in 1917.

The article as printed

American Falls Press, January 15, 1914, page 8. Transcribed from the page scan.

GREAT CHANGE AT ARBON
A single township in Arbon valley last year produced 400,000 bushels of wheat. Six years ago there were not to exceed ten settlers in that township, and the grain producing qualities of the soil were but little known. But like other parts of the county Arbon Valley has been developing, and is peopled by first class men and women. It [illegible] destined, with improved market facilities, to become one of the most wealthy and prosperous [illegible] of the county. Too much praise can not be given to the enterprise of the people who have made this great change possible.