Jeremiah Baker owned and ran the Carlyle hotel in Pocatello and lived there too, and it was there, at noon on Saturday, January 27, 1940, that his life ended. The next morning's Sunday Tribune-Journal called him an Arbon pioneer. In Arbon Valley he had always been Jerry Baker: a rancher who came up from Mendon, Utah, around the turn of the century, married the daughter of the man the valley was named for, and kept his ranches after he moved to town.
From Mendon to Arbon
Both obituaries give his birthday as December 5. The Pocatello paper places his birth at Mendon, in Cache Valley, and names his parents as Jeremiah and Mary Tamer Lemmon Baker; the Logan paper names his parents as Jeremiah and Mary Lemon Baker and says he grew up there. They disagree on the year. The Pocatello paper gives 1883 and an age of 56; the Logan Herald Journal gives 1882 and 57, which is also the year in the family records the site's research has gathered. By the Pocatello paper's count he had been an Arbon man for forty years when he died, by the Logan paper's about thirty-eight, and the Logan paper adds that ranching was what took him there. Either way he came about 1900 to 1902.
He kept his ties to Mendon. In November 1911 the Logan Republican's Mendon column reported Jerry Baker of Arbon visiting there for a few days, and in December that he and Chauncey Payne of Arbon would spend Christmas in Mendon. He was one of the Cache Valley men who went back and forth between the two places, as told in Mendon in winter, Arbon in summer.
In the Arbon columns
By early June 1915 he had come back from Malad with a new Ford, at a time when, by the South Arbon column's count, there were about fifteen cars in the valley (A spring malady). That August, when eleven-year-old Bard Bailey fell ill with appendicitis, it was in Jerry Baker's car that he was rushed to the hospital in Pocatello (The long road to the doctor). For Pioneer Day in 1916 he and Marsdon Tallon were the sports committee.
His obituary dates his wedding to Mayme Arbon to January 6, 1918, and puts it in Ogden. She was Martha Mary Ann Arbon, a daughter of George Arbon, formerly Mrs. Johnston, with three children, Stella, Ethel and Charley. She had been living at Arbon under her maiden name, and her house there had burned in July 1916. The site's Arbon family history calls Jerry her neighbour. No 1918 report of the wedding has been found.
The columns of 1920 show a busy household. In January the Bakers went to Malad for her father's eightieth birthday. In March the Arbon correspondent wrote that they had entertained a number of friends at home, "as Mr. and Mrs. Baker are royal entertainers." In May his sister and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Carl North of Pocatello, spent a week end with them. That spring a stock grazing or range association was incorporated at Arbon, and the Press of May 7, 1920, reported:
Officers were elected as follows: President, Jery Baker; secretary-treasurer, Lucien McLarry. These two officers had the constitution and by-laws of their organization drawn in Pocatello last week. The purpose of the organization is to keep the sheep out of the canyons and prevent them from grazing on the ranges thereby reserving the pasture land for stock belonging to farmers.
By July the column said Jerry Baker, Lucien McLarry and others had "been doing good work in keeping the sheep back." That summer is told in Keeping the sheep out of Arbon's canyons. In March 1921 Mayme was at her father's bedside in Malad when he died (Grandpa Arbon dies).
In the winter of 1923–24, when the Valley View school children were writing the valley news (their columns), they reported that Mrs. Baker and her son Charles Johnston had gone to Utah for the winter, that Jerry Baker had gone to Mendon, and in March that he and Pete Larsen had gone to Pocatello and found the roads bad as far as Pauline.
The Pocatello years
About 1930, by the obituary, the Bakers moved to Pocatello, where they ran the Carlyle hotel (the Logan paper spells it Carlisle). The ranches stayed in his hands even so. When his father, Jeremiah Baker, died suddenly at Mendon on September 10, 1931, the papers still listed the son as Jerry Baker Jr. of Arbon, and Bishop Joseph Arbon of Arbon, Mayme's brother, spoke at the funeral. By the Ward family's account, Elmer Ward bought the Jerry Baker farm in 1939, and it became the Ward farm headquarters (The Wards between Malad and their Arbon farm).
He was buried at Mendon after a funeral in the Mendon ward chapel on Tuesday, January 30, 1940. The Logan Herald Journal's Mendon column named some of the guests at dinners given after the services, among them Mrs. Jesse Ward and Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Ward of Malad, the Norths of Pocatello, and his stepdaughter Stella Bailey. It remembered him as a man "lovingly known by all his friends as Jerry."
The papers do not tell where the Carlyle hotel stood or when the Bakers took it over. Neither obituary names children of his own. Mayme lived until 1953.
On this site: Mayme's entry in the Arbon family history and the Ward family, who farmed his land after him.
The story as reported
Sunday Tribune-Journal, January 28, 1940, page 12, with the Logan Herald Journal of January 29, 1940, page 1. The original articles are under copyright; this is our own report of what they said.
Pocatello readers of the Sunday Tribune-Journal learned on January 28 that the man who kept the Carlyle hotel had died the day before. His name was Jeremiah Baker and he was 56. Home for him was a set of rooms inside the Carlyle, and that is where he died, at noon on the Saturday.
Mendon, Utah, was his birthplace by the paper's account, which named Jeremiah and Mary Tamer Lemmon Baker as his parents and set his birthday at December 5, 1883. He had settled at Arbon forty years earlier, and a decade before his death he left the valley for Pocatello. Hotel work had not ended his ranching; he kept his ranches going the whole time, the paper said.
His wife Mayme, born an Arbon, had married him at Ogden on January 6, 1918, and she outlived him. The paper also counted his mother and two sisters among those left behind. Mrs. Mary T. Baker, the mother, and Mrs. Carl North, one of the sisters, both lived in Pocatello, while the other sister, Mrs. S. L. Helm, made her home in Santa Monica.
Funeral plans had not yet been announced when the paper went to press, and the Hall mortuary was caring for the body in the meantime.
On Monday the Logan Herald Journal carried its own notice on its front page. It put his birth in 1882 and his age at 57, said he had grown up in Mendon and gone to Arbon about 38 years earlier to ranch, and reported that he died of a heart ailment. It said he and his wife had run the hotel together. The Logan paper also named three stepchildren, Charlie Johnson, Mrs. Ethel Davis and Mrs. Stella Bailey, and gave the Pocatello sister's name as Mrs. Myrtle North. Services were set for 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Mendon ward chapel, with burial in the Mendon cemetery under the direction of the W. Loyal Hall mortuary.
Sources
- Sunday Tribune-Journal, January 28, 1940, page 12
- Logan Herald Journal, January 29, 1940, page 1
- Logan Herald Journal, February 3, 1940, page 5
- Logan Republican, November 28, 1911, page 8
- Logan Republican, December 19, 1911, page 4
- American Falls Press, June 3, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, June 17, 1915, page 1
- American Falls Press, September 2, 1915, page 8
- American Falls Press, August 3, 1916, page 4
- American Falls Press, January 9, 1920, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 12, 1920, page 3
- American Falls Press, May 7, 1920, page 5
- American Falls Press, May 14, 1920, page 2
- American Falls Press, July 16, 1920, page 3
- American Falls Press, March 25, 1921, page 2
- American Falls Press, April 1, 1921, page 1
- American Falls Press, December 20, 1923, page 2
- American Falls Press, January 3, 1924, page 2
- American Falls Press, March 6, 1924, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, September 21, 1931, page 2
- Logan Herald Journal, September 16, 1931, page 8