In the last week of July 1948, Arbon Valley wheat growers met in the schoolhouse at Pauline and decided to sell their grain together. Some 50 of them would make up a local branch of an Ogden, Utah, grain cooperative, and the Michaud elevator, on the railroad west of Pocatello, was where their crop would go. The Pocatello Tribune reported the plan on Sunday, August 1, in a short item on page 8. Nearly everything in it came from one man, Carl Rudeen of Pocatello. The elevator was his, and the new unit meant to run it.
The meeting was held on the Monday evening before the report, which would have been July 26. Buying was set to open on a Thursday, probably August 5, with Bob Wennergren of Pocatello in charge; he had finished his schooling at the Utah State Agricultural College in Logan. The elevator, Rudeen said, now had a new 50-ton scale and could hold roughly 60,000 bushels, and he expected that as many as 150,000 might go through it before the season ended. The growers hoped one day to store 200,000. Up to then, he said, the valley's farmers had been selling to grain dealers in Pocatello, Schiller and Malad.
An old idea in the valley
A grain house run for the growers themselves was not a new idea in Arbon Valley. From 1914 to 1917 the Farmers' Society of Equity planned an elevator for the valley that the papers never report as built. In 1920 valley farmers pledged most of their crop to the wheat pool, and in 1930 they began organizing a grain local under the Federal Farm Board.
A Carl Rudeen, very probably the same man, had taken part in another such effort. On March 7, 1927, a gathering of Arbon Valley wheat growers met at the Pocatello chamber of commerce, with County Agent L. E. Tillotson presiding, to talk about building or buying a community warehouse to store their wheat. The Salt Lake Tribune named the original committee as Ed England, William Allard, T. H. Hill, Carl Rudeen and J. H. Keeler. As our post on the buying war at Schiller tells, the papers found so far do not say whether they bought one.
In January 1931 Carl Rudeen was one of the valley's leading wheat men, by the Pocatello Tribune's account. His Arbon holdings came to roughly 3,500 acres, of which 2,600 could be plowed, and he had arranged to buy the sheep outfit of the Thorton brothers (as the paper spelled the name); local wheat farmers, he told the paper, should rotate their crops and raise livestock alongside their grain. The 1948 article describes the elevator owner as running a wheat ranch and a stock ranch in Power County. The two are very probably the same man, though no article says so. A Carl Rudeen of Pocatello also leased the range near Arbon that was sown with grass from an airplane in 1938.
Wheat at Michaud
Arbon wheat had gone to Michaud for a long time. In 1908 sixteen wagons hauled a carload of sacked wheat to the Michaud switch. In August 1928, with more Power County red wheat coming out of the valley than ever before, the Salt Lake Tribune reported a 50-by-120-foot addition going up on the warehouse at Michaud. A year later the manager of the Pocatello Mill and Elevator Company announced that a new 110,000-bushel warehouse there was nearly half full of sacked wheat brought in by Arbon Valley farmers. Rudeen told the Tribune in 1948 that he had owned the Michaud elevator for ten years, so since about 1938, and had been connected with the Ogden cooperative for eight. The papers read here do not say whether his elevator was one of the buildings of 1928 and 1929.
The 1948 report does not mention it, but the year before had shown what a shortage of storage could mean. On September 3, 1947, the Tribune told how southeastern Idaho had run short of both bins and rail cars, so that grain dealers reckoned some 300,000 bushels of wheat and barley were lying in the open. Frank Heaton, who managed the Power County Grain Growers' elevator, had 80,000 bushels of it outdoors. The article did not say where that elevator stood.
What is not known
The Tribune item is the only report of the cooperative found so far. It does not name the growers who met at Pauline, who led the meeting, or any of the 50 members. No later report found says whether the cooperative took over the elevator, began buying that Thursday, or ever built the 200,000 bushels of storage. Nothing more about Bob Wennergren has turned up in the papers searched. A Power County Grain Growers elevator appears again in the Idaho State Journal in 1968 and 1969, but whether it had anything to do with the Michaud unit of 1948 is not known.
On this site: the first grain warehouse at Pauline, and the Pauline and West Fork area.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, August 1, 1948, page 8. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A new cooperative unit of about 50 Arbon Valley wheat growers was to begin buying grain at Michaud that Thursday, the Tribune said in a short Sunday item.
Growers settled on the idea the Monday before, gathered in the schoolhouse at Pauline. They would become a branch of an Ogden, Utah, cooperative, which the paper named as the Grain Growers, and the Michaud elevator would become theirs to sell wheat from. Running the unit would be Bob Wennergren, a Pocatello man who had graduated from the Utah State Agricultural College in Logan.
Carl Rudeen of Pocatello supplied every detail. Besides a wheat ranch and a stock ranch in Power County, he had held the Michaud elevator for ten years, and his ties to the Ogden group went back eight.
The building now weighed loads on a new 50-ton scale, Rudeen said. Roughly 60,000 bushels fit inside, and he judged that 150,000 could go through in 1948. Down the road the growers hoped to enlarge Michaud to hold 200,000 bushels and to handle 300,000 a year.
Valley wheat, he said, had so far been sold to dealers in three towns: Pocatello, Schiller and Malad.
Rudeen also described the parent group. Its Ogden plant could hold three million bushels, and he expected about 10 million to pass through it in 1948. Its branches were numerous and spread over two states, with the bulk of the grain coming from the Idaho side rather than the Utah one.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, August 1, 1948, page 8
- Pocatello Tribune, January 7, 1931, page 2
- Pocatello Tribune, September 3, 1947, page 1
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 1927, page 11
- Salt Lake Tribune, August 26, 1928, page 31
- Salt Lake Tribune, September 2, 1929, page 10
- Idaho State Journal, August 22, 1968, page 8
- Idaho State Journal, June 18, 1969, page 8