The Logan Temple fire and an Arbon wedding, December 1917
Eddie Davis and May Mathews of Arbon came to Cache Valley to marry in the Logan Temple in December 1917, found it burned, and married in Salt Lake City instead.
1917 in the valley.
News, observations, announcements, and remembrances from the original Arbon Valley community blog.
Browse the original records
Community blog · 2010–2020 · original publication order · stories from the old papers added since 2026
↗
Sophia Andersen of Mendon, mother of the Arbon Andersens
Sophia Andersen of Mendon, Utah, never homesteaded in Arbon Valley, but the papers of 1929–1939 show her Arbon children and grandchildren coming home to her house.
Horses and the first tractors in Arbon Valley, 1916–1922
From a 10-20 tractor plowing 350 acres in 1916 to a Fordson on a 1921 sale bill, the papers show the first tractors at work beside Arbon Valley's big horse teams.
A valley of log cabins: canyon timber in Arbon and Crystal, 1917
In 1917 the American Falls Press's farm writer found Arbon Valley full of log cabins built from canyon timber, and reported ranchers going back to the canyons for wood when coal ran short.
Ten cents, two cows and a greased pig: the J. R. Baileys of Arbon
In 1917 the American Falls Press profiled J. R. Bailey of Arbon, who had come with ten cents and two cows; in 1940 he and Annie marked fifty years married, recalling a greased pig.
Hy Secrist and the wheat thieves at Pauline, 1917
In November 1917 a Pauline wheat buyer followed a stolen load by lantern, and Deputy Sheriff Hy Secrist waited for the thieves behind a telephone pole.
The Davis store at Arbon, 1914–1931
The papers' view of Ed and Esther Davis's general store at Arbon, kept until 1931: the freight trips, Mrs. Davis at the counter and the store as a landmark.
The Lusk brothers and the Bailey sisters of Pauline
Brothers Dave and Park Lusk of Pauline married sisters Anna and Erma Bailey of Arbon; the papers followed them through the First World War, Erma's death in 1922 and the obituaries of 1952–1960.
Isabelle Noble and the Noble children of Pauline, 1915–1921
Between 1915 and 1921 John and Fanny Noble, who kept the store at Pauline, lost four children, among them Isabelle, 12, who had clerked in her father's store.
D. J. Bowen tells the Pilgrim how Arbon began, 1917
In October 1917 the American Falls Press printed D. J. Bowen's account of the 1892 search for water, his 1893 aspen-log cabin and Arbon's first post office.
Bugle calls at midnight: the valley sends off its draft men, 1917
In the fall of 1917 Arbon and Crystal held farewell dances for the first valley men called in the draft, and the American Falls Press followed them to Camp Lewis.
The Pilgrim on foot: a roving writer in Arbon Valley, 1917
In the fall of 1917 the American Falls Press's roving farm writer, the Pilgrim, walked the roads of Crystal, Pauline and Arbon and wrote down what he met along the way.
An aeroplane in the night sky over Arbon, 1917
In September 1917 the Arbon column of the American Falls Press reported that neighbors had seen an aeroplane fly over the valley one night, twelve years before the first airplane on record there.
Before the draft: Arbon Valley's volunteers of 1917
In 1917, before the draft reached them, young men of Arbon and Crystal enlisted at Pocatello, Salt Lake City and Portland, and the papers named them one by one.
Crystal's telephone line to Pocatello, 1917
Crystal settlers set light poles toward Pocatello in the winter of 1917 with Commercial Club money, and by July the line was joined to Mountain States at a fifteen-cent toll.
A June snowdrift and a broken bridge: the roads to town in 1917
In 1917 a deputy sheriff was stranded six hours in a June snowdrift, a mail carrier forded floodwater and a Portneuf bridge broke under a load of Crystal grain.
The Jenks family's years at Pauline, 1909–1923
Obituaries printed decades later and short items in the papers of the day trace the Jenks family from Weston to Pauline, at the valley's north end, and away again.
Pauline's beginnings and Bishop Kowallis's Meadow Ward, 1910–1918
How Pauline got its store, school and post office, and how its Meadow Ward fared under its first bishop, Wilhelm F. Kowallis, from 1911 to his farewell in 1918.
Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, 1911–1917
In 1911 Crystal was a new settlement wanting a school; by 1917 the American Falls Press found about 150 families in a basin so well hidden that strangers could not find the road in.
The squatters of 1892, in Mrs. Logan's words
Mrs. E. A. Logan's 1917 history tells how the first squatters took up Bannock Valley in the 1890s; in 1920 she retold it as a birthday tribute to George Arbon.