In the fall of 1951 the Arbon school district still kept a one-room school at Mercer Creek, in the Crystal country at the upper end of Arbon Valley. On Friday, November 9, the Idaho State Journal of Pocatello gave it a short item from American Falls under the headline "Mercer Creek School Has No Pupil Worries." Four children made up the whole school that fall, and Mrs. G. W. Bradley taught them.
The Bradley ranch lies in the Rattlesnake Creek drainage near the foot of Mercer Creek Road. The site's Crystal history remembers a Rattlesnake schoolhouse up Mercer Creek Road, where a Sunday school for all denominations met in 1911, and counts five other schools in the Crystal area besides the Crystal Central School of 1912, among them one on Mercer Creek just up from Rattlesnake. Whether the Mercer Creek school of 1951 met in the old Rattlesnake building the papers do not say.
Why a school for four
The Journal did not say in so many words why the district kept so small a school, but it described the setting. Though Mercer Creek belonged to the Arbon district, the families who used the school lived a long way from Arbon, many miles by the Journal's count. In several past winters the roads between had drifted shut. Nor could anyone call ahead, because Arbon had no telephone connection to Mercer Creek or to Crystal. An educator the item left unnamed held that those conditions argued against closing the little schools and sending their children to Arbon. Heavy snow, by that view, could cut the youngsters off from home, and the district would have had no means of letting their parents know.
The telephone problem was still there not quite two years later. That July, the Idaho Sunday Journal reported, residents of the Arbon Valley and Crystal districts had petitions going around asking for dial telephones and for a connection that reached Pocatello without a detour. The valley's thirty subscribers were served through a switchboard in the home of Mrs. Lee Newport, and their calls went by way of American Falls on a line that, she said, often did not work. Crystal, by the paper's account, had gone without phones altogether.
The teacher's letter
Not quite six weeks after the first item, on December 18, 1951, the same paper printed a letter from the teacher in Ing's "Buzz of the Burg" column. Her school now had three pupils: J. Rodney Smith and Gebe Butterfield in the eighth grade and Alan Lusk in the first. As far as she and the children knew, the letter said, no school in Idaho was smaller, and they were "not overcrowded." The letter does not say what became of the fourth pupil, and the papers do not say which valley families the three children belonged to.
The papers name the teacher only by her husband's initials. George Willard Bradley, who had settled on Rattlesnake Creek, was killed in 1937, and his son Willard (George Willard Bradley Jr.) served in the Marines and later came back to run the family ranch. Mrs. G. W. Bradley of 1951 may have been Willard's wife, but the site's family research has not confirmed who she was. Nor does it place Willard back in the valley by 1951: he has not been found in Power County in the 1950 census, and the research has not dated the end of the lease held by Harold Crump, the neighbor who took on the ranch after George's death. By the family's account, Willard's mother, Ella Miller Bradley, had taught at the Rattlesnake school on Mercer Creek more than thirty years before.
A field trip in 1955
By the spring of 1955 the Mercer Creek school was closed. The Journal of May 16, 1955, reported on field trips that McCammon's elementary grades had taken late the week before. Thirty-nine second and third graders, with their teachers Mary Thornley and Hazel Wrensted and with Leo Crump at the wheel of the bus, rode out through "the Gap" into Arbon Valley. That was probably Garden Creek Gap, on the road between McCammon and the Rattlesnake country, where a rancher skiing out to McCammon was snowed in during the winter of 1949. The paper singled out the old one-room schools at Mercer Creek and Crystal as the part of the outing the children enjoyed; neither building had held classes for about four years. The swings in the yard still worked, and the youngsters put them to use. Lunch came later, at Cherry Springs on Mink Creek, and then the bus brought everyone home.
"About four years" points to both schools closing in or soon after 1951; Mercer Creek was still open that December, so it cannot have closed before then. The papers read for this post do not report either closing, say where the Crystal-end children went to school afterward, or say which of Crystal's schoolhouses the McCammon children saw.
On this site: Schools of Arbon Valley, Lila Wade of Horse Island, teacher in Arbon's one-room schools, and Eight pupils, three families: the Armstrong school.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 9, 1951, page 8. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A short dispatch from American Falls, sent by the Journal's Idaho News Service, put the enrollment at Arbon Valley's Mercer Creek school that fall at four. The four were taught by Mrs. G. W. Bradley. The paper thought so small a roll unusual enough to headline.
Distance was the point of the item: the school's families lived many miles from Arbon, the town whose district the school belonged to. The item gave two reasons that distance mattered. The way in had been drifted shut in some past winters. Telephones were no help either, since none connected Arbon with Mercer Creek or with Crystal.
Those facts weighed against folding the outlying schools into Arbon's, by the reckoning of an educator the paper quoted without a name. The danger that educator foresaw was a heavy storm stranding the children away from home after a merger, with their parents left uninformed for lack of a phone.
The report did not describe the school building or name the pupils, and it did not say how long the Mercer Creek school had been running.