In the summer of 1947 frost got into the wheat of Arbon and Crystal, in a year when Power County as a whole brought in a bumper grain crop. In the pages we have read, the valley's loss never got a story of its own in the Pocatello Tribune. It turns up instead in a few lines of crop news between July and September, and those lines are what this post is built from.
The first word came on July 10, from Fred Burton of the Pocatello Mill & Elevator, who was back from a trip to Boise. Word in Boise was that eastern Idaho's grain had been badly hurt by a frost not long before, and that Bancroft and Arbon Valley had suffered more than most. Arbon farmers, by his account, were already mowing a good share of their damaged grain for hay. Burton named one more district that had suffered badly, the dry farms west of Idaho Falls.
Arbon men had faced the same choice before. After the June frost of 1914, as our post on the frost year tells, E. Keeler of Arbon expected that no more than a third of the valley's wheat acreage would be harvested, apart from what might be cut for hay.
The papers do not give the date of the 1947 frost. The July report calls it recent. In September a Malad man on Oneida County's agricultural advisory committee spoke of frost damage late in June in Oneida County, just south of the valley. That was probably the same cold spell, but no report we found ties a particular night to Arbon.
By early August the county agent, Sterling Schow, could put figures to the damage, and the Tribune printed them on August 6 in the report retold below. No district in the county came off worse than Arbon and Crystal, and even there the damage varied a great deal from one farm to the next. Schow was very likely the same Sterling Schow who was still Power County's agent in the 1970s, when he counted the acres sprayed against grasshoppers.
The frost did not leave the valley bare. On August 19 the Tribune printed a letter from Mrs. Carl Wrensted of Crystal Route, Arbon, about a visit from Mrs. Jeannette Pocatello and Mrs. Margaret Lavatta Calvin. Mrs. Pocatello had never traveled through Arbon Valley before, and the letter told how the two women enjoyed the heavy stands of wheat and the healthy look of the fields.
On September 3 the Tribune reported Power County close to the end of a harvest of 3,000,000 bushels. Frost had taken grain at Roy and in the "upper Arbon valley," a phrase the paper left undefined, yet the county's total still ranked as a bumper crop. By then the worry ran the other way: there was more grain than anyone could store or ship. Southeastern Idaho was short of both bin space and freight cars, and by the grain dealers' reckoning some 300,000 bushels of the region's wheat and barley were sitting on the bare ground. At the Power County Grain Growers' elevator, manager Frank Heaton said 80,000 bushels had gone onto the ground because he had been left no alternative.
After the harvest came the plowing, and then the dust. On Saturday, September 13, a west wind blowing 40 miles an hour or harder all day, with gusts reaching 50, drove dust into Pocatello. It came off grain land in Arbon Valley and the American Falls country that had just gone under the plow. Townspeople, the paper reported, had a name for it: "a good old Power county cloudburst."
In November a University of Idaho journalism student, Melba Rae Barnett of Pocatello, wrote a long portrait of the valley for the Tribune. In her telling, 1947 made six straight years of big grain crops at good prices in Arbon. She did not mention that year's frost.
Much stays unknown. No frost report names a single Arbon or Crystal farmer, or says which fields lost half their grain and which lost nine-tenths. Schow did not say whether his percentages meant lost bushels or lost acres, and no report counts the grain cut for hay. The paper set the valley's loss beside the county's bumper crop and the visitors' praise of the wheat without trying to reconcile them; the frost may simply have hit some fields and spared others.
On this site: the frost year of 1914 and its place among the valley's tragedies, and Arbon Valley wheat farms in the want ads, 1946–1959.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, August 6, 1947, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A short report from American Falls gave Power County's harvest two sides in early August 1947: a big crop for the county overall, and the county's heaviest frost losses in the Arbon and Crystal country.
The loss figures came from County Agent Sterling Schow. By his count Arbon and Crystal had lost the most, 20 to 30 percent of their grain. For a few growers there the toll ran to half the crop, and for some to nine-tenths. The frost was milder elsewhere. Around Rockland and Roy the damage averaged 5 to 10 percent, and the county's northwest corner, the least affected district, reported 1 or 2 percent. Where the frost had been light, Schow rated the crop a good one.
The best yield reported was 44 bushels an acre, at Roy, and the low across the county was 18. Thirty bushels an acre is a good harvest for Pleasant Valley, and some of its wheat averaged that much. The wheat from around Rockland stood out, high in protein and better than usual in grade. The county's grain was valued at $5 million to $6 million. One estimate had the 1947 crop outrunning 1946's, though harvest was only getting into full swing and many growers were holding their grain in private elevators.
Arbon lagged behind the rest. Parts of it had grain only now coming ripe, when Pleasant Valley, which started cutting on July 12, had nearly finished. Countywide, though, the harvest was ahead of 1946's pace.
Demand for wheat was strong, and the only check on shipping was the supply of railroad cars. Before the week was half over, one elevator in town had loaded and sent off over 60 cars of grain.