Joseph Nelson Williams died in a Pocatello hospital on Saturday, May 15, 1943. He was 69. The next morning's Pocatello Tribune gave him a short obituary on its third page. He was then working at the General hospital in town, but most of his married life had been spent at Crystal, the high basin north of Pauline where springs feed Rattlesnake Creek. Going by the paper's dates, he farmed there for about 26 years.
From Pennsylvania to Crystal
According to the obituary, Williams was a Pennsylvanian, born April 18, 1874, whose road west ran through Colorado and Utah. Salt Lake City was the scene of his wedding to Minnie Lund on January 15, 1906. By the paper's count he had been at Crystal for 29 years when he died, so he would have arrived there about 1914. The site's land research records a 160-acre homestead patent issued to Joseph N. Williams on March 14, 1922, in sections 26 and 35 of Township 8 South, Range 34 East, land listed under the Caribou National Forest.
In September 1917 the American Falls Press thought his garden worth a headline:
Crystal Farmer Raising Peanuts.
Mr. and Mrs J N Williams are successfully raising peanuts in their ranch garden on the divide. This garden is located at an altitude of 6000 feet and irrigated from a spring. The seed for the peanuts was sent in from the south and the plants are growing well despite the fact that they were planted late in the season.
The item went on to place the Williams ranch in the Crystal country, over the top of the divide on the road from Pocatello.
In October 1918 the Power County local board's list of the men who registered for the draft in September 1918 included "Williams, Joseph H., Crystal." He was 44 that fall, and the "H." is very probably a misprint or a misreading of his middle initial N.
The Gabbert school years
The 1920 census found the family in the Crystal precinct: Joseph N. Williams, 45, a farmer who owned his place free of debt, his wife Minnie, their daughter Eva, 13, and their son Joseph, 10. An Eva Williams and a Joseph Williams, almost certainly these two children, went to the Gabbert school, one of the small schools of the Crystal country, and their names turn up in the papers. In the spring of 1918 a county report on the schools' thrift-stamp sales credited the Gabbert school with 50 cents for the week, 25 cents each from Harold Gabbert and Eva Williams.
In March 1924, the same winter told in Crystal almost deserted, the Gabbert school column reported a dance at the Wrensted home given by Eva Williams and Helen Wrensted, with sherbet and cake served later on. Joseph was one of four pupils on the honor roll "for being neither absent nor tardy." The next week the column noted that "Mr Williams of Crystal caught two coyotes" (probably the father, though the item gives no first name), and that Eva, Joseph and Paul Wrensted had called on Wilma Tate. In April both children were named with the Gabbert pupils in the county's list of rural-school attendance records.
Staying on, and leaving
The Williamses were still at Crystal in 1930, when the census again listed Joseph N. and Minnie Williams there, and they stayed until about 1940. The son seems to have set up his own household in the valley. The site's family research takes him to be the Joseph Williams who married Ruby Sims Wheatley, the widow of Thomas O. Wheatley, in November 1929 and was living at Pauline in 1930. That is a probable identification, not a proven one.
By 1943 the son was in Pocatello and Eva was Mrs. Eva Blaine of Oakland, California. The obituary also names two stepsons, Calvin R. Johnson and John LeRoy Johnson, but it does not say how they came into the family, and we have not found out.
Much else is unknown: what Williams did in Colorado and Utah, when he first filed on the Crystal land, what became of the homestead after he left, and where he was buried. This family is not the Williams family of Arbon known for Sod Williams and his quarter horses, nor the Williamses of West Fork, and no source we have read connects them.
On this site: Crystal as an American Falls Press writer found it in 1917, in the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, and the valley of log cabins the same year.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, May 16, 1943, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
The paper reported the death of Joseph Nelson Williams, 69, who had farmed at Crystal for many years and was lately on the staff of the General hospital. He died on Saturday, May 15, while a patient in a Pocatello hospital.
Pennsylvania was his birthplace, and the date was April 18, 1874. The obituary traced his path from there to Colorado, then to Utah, and finally to Crystal, Idaho, where he took up farming some 29 years before he died. About three years before his death, around 1940, he gave up the farm and settled in Pocatello.
His widow, the former Minnie Lund, had been his wife since their wedding in Salt Lake City on January 15, 1906. The obituary listed a son, Joseph N. Williams of Pocatello, and a daughter, Mrs. Eva Blaine of Oakland, California. It also named two stepsons, Calvin R. Johnson of Pocatello and John LeRoy Johnson of Salt Lake City, and said there were six grandchildren. Pueblo, Colorado, was home to all five of his surviving brothers and sisters: Mrs. Katie Fitzgerald, Mrs. Nancy B. Gallagher, Mrs. Ora Lynch, Edward Williams and Samuel Williams.
Bishop Arnold Reddish was to conduct the service at the Sixth Ward church at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, May 18. A funeral notice from the Hall mortuary on the same page gave the same hour and identified the church as the Sixth Ward L.D.S. church.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, May 16, 1943, page 3
- American Falls Press, September 28, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, April 2, 1918, page 1
- American Falls Press, October 18, 1918, page 3
- American Falls Press, March 6, 1924, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 13, 1924, page 2
- American Falls Press, April 10, 1924, page 2
- 1920 U.S. census, Power County, Idaho, Crystal precinct, image n470 (household of Joseph N. Williams)
- 1930 U.S. census, Power County, Idaho, Crystal precinct, ED 39-5, images n1023–n1027
- Homestead patent to Joseph N. Williams, March 14, 1922 (IDBL 0029941)