For thirty-four years Arbon Valley looked after its own roads through Highway District No. 3 of Power County, a road district with its own commissioners and its own bonds. On Saturday, May 17, 1952, the valley's voters decided 54 to 18 to give it up, and the next morning the Idaho Sunday Journal, the Sunday edition of the Idaho State Journal, put the result in a short item on its front page. The question had come up six months before, when valley residents protested and the county let the district stand.
The district was born in a special election on June 12, 1918, held under Idaho's 1911 act for organizing highway districts. Two of the county commissioners, Walter S. Sparks and R. W. Peterson, canvassed the returns and found the vote unanimous, and the American Falls Press printed their order declaring the territory "created and established into Highway District No. 3." Its boundary, set out in township and section lines, ran along the edges of the Fort Hall reservation and the Bannock County line. That fall a special election in the Arbon and Pauline precincts carried $50,000 in bonds for the district; the American Falls Press gave the Pauline count, 56 to 10. A new road in a dry year tells how its first commissioners graveled the Bannock Creek road in 1919, and Arbon's road money and the wheat haul of 1921 tells how it lost its cash in a bank failure two years later.
The district turns up now and then in the papers after that. In March 1938 it was a defendant, with two men, in a $50,000 damage suit brought by Willis Bullock, a WPA worker said to have been on loan to the road work. Bullock had lost a leg while working on a machine used to clear snow from the Arbon Valley roads. A Power County jury found for the defendants.
By November 20, 1951, a petition asking the commissioners at American Falls to dissolve the district was before them. The paper named one signer, Jesse L. Thompson, and said more than 30 others had joined him. He was probably Jesse Loosle Thompson of Logan, Utah, whose family had a dry farm in Arbon Valley, as the Summit century farm tells, though the paper gives no home for him. In their view the county could look after those roads at less cost and with less trouble than a separate district, and there was no longer good reason for the district to go on. The commissioners set a hearing for December 10 at the courthouse.
The district survived. A crowd from Arbon Valley turned out before the commissioners to object, and the Journal of December 12 told readers the district would go on. The man who spoke for the group goes unnamed in the paper. His argument was that a vote taken then would bring out too few voters, and he meant to fight the change until the commissioners showed they could keep the roads better than Oneida County, which covers the south end of the valley, kept its own. Commissioner LeRoy Lindley countered that Power County had twice the highway money Oneida had to work with. The article does not say where he lived, but he was probably the Arbon farmer of that name, a son of the Roy Lindley who had sat on the district's board in 1921 (see Roy Lindley and the golden eagle). LeRoy Lindley of Arbon was among the candidates for the county's new soil conservation board in 1948, and a LeRoy Lindley was still a Power County commissioner in 1969. As their example the commissioners offered Rockland, where the roads had already gone over to the county; by their account, people there liked the new arrangement much better than the old. The paper looked for the question to come back by petition when spring arrived.
What happened over the winter is not in the pages found. Whether a new petition was filed, who called the May election and how many could have voted are not known. The vote itself was plain: 72 ballots, three to one for dissolving. What became of the district's money, equipment and any remaining bonds was not reported.
On this site: the first state highway records the beginning of the valley's graveled road, and Arbon gives the setting.
The story as reported
Idaho Sunday Journal, May 18, 1952, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Arbon Valley's separate road district came to an end at the polls on Saturday, May 17, 1952. Seventy-two residents voted. Fifty-four of them were for ending Independent Highway District No. 3, while 18 would have kept it. From then on, the paper said, Power County was to have charge of the valley's roads.
The Sunday paper gave the result in a few lines near the foot of its front page, under the heading "Vote to Dissolve." It did not say where the polls had been, how many residents could have voted, or who had asked for the election.
A short follow-up item ran in the Idaho State Journal on Friday, May 23. The commissioners had gone over the returns during the week, and their official tally matched the first one: 54 to 18. Responsibility for what had been district roads passed to the county highway department.
Sources
- Idaho Sunday Journal, May 18, 1952, page 1
- Idaho State Journal, May 23, 1952, page 2
- Idaho State Journal, November 20, 1951, page 3
- Idaho State Journal, December 12, 1951, page 5
- American Falls Press, June 25, 1918, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 15, 1918, page 3
- Pocatello Tribune, March 10, 1938, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, September 27, 1948, page 6
- Idaho State Journal, June 18, 1969, page 8