On Sunday, September 20, 1959, the Idaho Sunday Journal reported that the long construction job on the highway through Arbon Valley was almost over. Work on 43 miles of State Highway 38 had gone forward in two sections, starting at the Mink Creek summit and running south through the valley, and the district engineer for southeast Idaho thought the last of it would be done in a week or ten days. It was one of several reports from 1957 to 1961 that together show the roads into and through the valley being oiled a stretch at a time.
The Pauline road, 1957
The first came from American Falls in September 1957. Setting the year's tax levies, the Power County commissioners put the Arbon school district at 1.50 mills, and in other business they approved a contract with the Holmes Construction Co. of Heyburn for oiling "the Pauline road." The Journal's short report, printed on September 15, does not say which stretch of road that was, how long it was or what the work cost. It may have been part of the Bannock Creek road running north from Pauline, but the paper does not say so. By March 1961 that road was paved: a Salt Lake Tribune report of a plane crash that month placed the wreck about five miles northwest of Pauline and about a mile from "the paved Bannock Creek road."
A farm-to-market road toward Hawkins, 1958
The next summer Bannock County, east of the valley, was building a road of its own. Only 2½ miles remained to finish the nine-mile Virginia–Hawkins road, which ran from U.S. Highway 91-191 to the Hawkins Reservoir, and on July 6, 1958, the Journal reported that the county would ask for bids on that last stretch about July 15. The county had $3,500 of its own in the job, and Commissioner James A. Abbott said the federal money to match it, a $40,000 grant, was now in hand. The other seven miles were already under construction with federal help; the last stretch had waited on money and right of way. Under the federal aid program the road was classed as farm-to-market; the farms it was meant to serve lay in the Hawkins basin and in "part of the Arbon Valley." Abbott's plan called for gravel that year, with the county adding the oil in 1959.
Highway 38, 1959
Then came the main work of 1959, told in the report below. The engineer, Robert B. Christensen, gave the route but not the surface, the cost or the contractors. Power and Oneida counties, he said, would be handed the road once the work met standard. It crossed both counties: the Buist area at the valley's south end lies in Oneida County, the rest of the valley in Power. The article does not explain why the road was to pass to the counties.
When the Pocatello Chamber of Commerce summed up its year, it took some of the credit. Its annual report, summarized in the Idaho State Journal's Progress Edition of February 29, 1960, counted the finished, oiled road from Mink Creek into Arbon Valley among the gains of 1959. Some of that success, the report said, came from the Chamber's agriculture and highway committees pulling together, and the road "opens up the upper valley year around," giving valley people their best route to Pocatello yet.
The valley's own memory dates the change to the same year. This site's history of Buist records that the gravel road was first oiled about 1959, from Holbrook north up the valley to where the road turned off to Crystal. The Chamber's report and the Buist history probably describe two ends of the same 1959 work, though neither source says so.
The Hawkins road accepted, 1961
The Hawkins road was not accepted until 1961. On September 14 of that year, the Journal reported that Bannock County would formally accept nine miles of the Virginia–Hawkins road the next day, after Abbott and County Engineer Vern Powell inspected it. The oiling and seal coat had been let to Mountain States Construction Co. of Pocatello. Farmers bound for Downey, Virginia and Arimo with their produce would have an easier haul, the commissioners said, and the new road would also reach the Arbon Valley and Crystal areas, which supplied much of the grain grown thereabouts. Federal money covered 62 per cent of the cost and the county 38 per cent, according to Commissioner Emmette Spraker.
What the papers leave out
None of these reports says what the new roads meant to the families who drove them. The papers read for this post do not say whether Holmes finished the Pauline road in 1957, which contractor oiled Highway 38, or when the highway actually passed to the counties; the flood reports of March 1962 told on this site still called it State Highway 38. They also do not say whether the Hawkins road was oiled in 1959, as first planned, or only shortly before its acceptance in 1961.
On this site: the first oiled road weighs the claims for when hard surfacing reached the valley; mail, grain and the Mink Creek road and Arbon's wheat road across the reservation tell earlier fights over the roads to town; the pilot killed near Bannock Peak tells the 1961 crash; Pauline and West Fork describes the valley's north end; and floods cut off Arbon Valley tells how, in March 1962, Rattlesnake Creek cut a break in State Highway 38.
The story as reported
Idaho Sunday Journal, September 20, 1959, page 4. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Construction on 43 miles of State Highway 38 through Arbon Valley was within days of completion in late September 1959. Robert B. Christensen, southeast Idaho's district engineer, was the source.
According to Christensen, it was "one of the longest projects in Idaho road building history."
Measured from the summit of the Mink Creek road southeast of Pocatello, the job reached south along the highway and down into the valley.
The engineer described the work as divided in two. With the first part all but complete, he gave the remaining part a week to ten days.
Once the road measured up to the required standard, he said, it would belong to Power and Oneida counties.
The item, printed on the paper's editorial page under the headline "Arbon Highway Nearly Finished," gave no figures for the cost of the work, did not describe the road's new surface and did not name the contractors who had built it.