Joe Arbon at ninety: the first furrow, remembered in 1965

On Sunday, September 19, 1965, the Idaho Sunday Journal gave a long illustrated feature to Joseph Nicholas "Joe" Arbon, who would turn 90 the following Saturday. He was the son of George Arbon, the man Arbon Valley was named for, and he had been the Arbon Ward's first bishop. The correspondent, Mrs. Fern Hartvigsen, built the piece from his memories of the 1890s. One of its photographs showed him in his garden at the old farm at Arbon.

What he remembered

Much of what he told her is also in his family's account, but the 1965 article adds details that account leaves out.

When the four families of 1896 arrived (David John Bowen, James Bailey, Ren Evans and Ed Davis), everyone put money into a common fund to buy a header, a grain-cutting machine. The fund came to $263, and part of it was the money Joe had been setting aside for a saddle. The family's first grain was sown on ten acres and returned 35 bushels to the acre. Other settlers broke new ground too, and the community had 300 acres planted before any threshing crew reached it over a route hardly better than a trail; the crew that finally came asked no pay for the work.

Sheep took him farther from home. One summer his job was to move bands of them some fifty miles to the country around Soda Springs, and on one stretch there he saw no other white person for three months. That was where he found out what the handful of black sheep in every band was for: once a black one went missing, a search for strays was overdue. The family's own sheep needed no driving; they had learned to come along at the sound of his voice.

With his six sisters gone from home, father and son were left to feed themselves. That arrangement ended on November 23, 1898, when he married Elizabeth Davis of Samaria in the Salt Lake temple. To get there the couple rode a springless wagon to Corinne, Utah, with his father and a brother of hers along, and went on by train. Their chickens were a wedding present.

The article also dated the valley's first church organization to August 18, 1900, under David J. Bowen, and said its first church building, put up with lumber bought in Pocatello, cost $45 in all.

Where the article differs

Not all of its history matches other records. It made the Arbons the first family to winter in the valley and the first to try summer fallowing; the site's Stories pages set out the competing accounts of the first winter and of summer fallowing. It credited Joe with 26 years as bishop, more than the church records behind the first-bishop entry show. It said his father retired to Malad in 1912 and died in 1941, but George Arbon died at Joe's Malad home on March 22, 1921. His memory of his mother sweeping a dirt floor with a rabbitbrush broom probably belongs to an earlier cabin, since she died at Almo before the family came to the valley. And it told, without a year or names, of three children drowned in a January crossing of Bannock Creek. That is probably the 1911 drowning of Nicholas Andersen and George and Dora Dalton, though the details differ.

Three earlier glimpses

The Arbons' golden wedding fell on Tuesday, November 23, 1948. That afternoon Joe, Elizabeth and their daughter, Mrs. Delta Harmon of Springfield, Massachusetts, were interviewed on KEYY, on the Pocatello Tribune society editor's weekly program. Talk on the program ranged from their farming days in Arbon Valley (named, as the paper pointed out, for his father) to their Salt Lake temple wedding and the reception held afterward at a sister of Joe's. The open house at their new home on East Center Street in Pocatello ran from 3 to 8 p.m. and drew upward of 150 guests. Their sons, Joseph G. of Pocatello and Harold of Salt Lake City, were there, and guests came from as far as Alberta. One, Mrs. T. O. King of Raymond, may have been his sister Maggie, who lived in Canada in 1921, but the paper did not say so.

In police court on April 10, 1952, Municipal Judge R. Don Bistline read out the name of a Joseph D. Zahm, ticketed for 44 miles an hour on South Fifth. Joe Arbon, 76 by then and hard of hearing, caught nothing but "Joseph" and stepped up. He told the judge the charge made no sense to him, since in his experience "everybody had kicked because I drive too slowly," yet he pleaded guilty anyway and left $5 poorer on top of the $5 bond he had already posted. Before long Joe was back, recalling that what he had actually been stopped for was an illegal left turn on Gould Street. The judge returned the second $5, observing that Arbon Valley bore this defendant's name; in fact it honored his father.

Elizabeth Davis Arbon died in a Pocatello hospital on January 29, 1957, at 77. Her obituary said she had been for many years president of the Arbon Ward Relief Society, as the site's account of the valley's Relief Society leaders also notes. It dated the couple's move to Pocatello to 1936, while other accounts give 1918 or about 1940. On February 13, 1958, Joe married Arvilla Hughes McKay.

Afterwards

The winter after his 90th birthday, Arbon Valley changed over to dial telephones, and the Idaho Sunday Journal reported in May 1966 that Joe Arbon was the one who placed the first long-distance call on the new system. He died in Pocatello on September 23, 1972, two days before his 97th birthday, as told in Two men of 1875.

On this site: the family accounts of George Dennis Arbon and Joseph George Arbon, and the Stories entry on the first meetinghouses.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, September 19, 1965, page 14. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Joseph N. Arbon, whose family's name was given to Arbon Valley, was to turn 90 on Saturday, September 25, 1965, six days after the profile appeared. For that afternoon his family arranged a 2-to-5 p.m. open house at the Twelfth Ward cultural hall on Fredregill Road, and let it be known that gifts were not wanted.

Snowville Sinks, Utah, was his birthplace and September 25, 1875, his birth date; his parents were George and Sarah Nicholas Arbon. Of their seven children he was the only son, and his mother died at Almo when she was 31. Grasshoppers and crickets had plagued northern Utah for seven years without a break, and that, more than anything, was why his father went looking for new farm country. In the profile's telling, the Arbons were the valley's first wintering family, back when it was called Bannock. Joe, at 20, cut its first furrow; the family's efforts brought the first irrigation; and they were the first to use summer fallowing there, with some fields left unsown every other season.

Four more families joined them in 1896, and their combined $263, saddle money of Joe's included, bought a header. Over the years Joe took sheep to the Soda Springs country and worked beside his father cutting and curing canyon hay; a few times he was still mowing when only the moon gave light. He and Elizabeth Davis of Samaria were married in the Salt Lake temple in 1898, after a wagon ride to Corinne and a train trip south. Elizabeth's death came in 1957; his second wife, whom he wed in February 1958, was Arvilla Hughes McKay.

The profile credited him with 26 years as bishop of the Arbon Ward and placed the building of the ward's meetinghouse in his second term. His accordion was a fixture of church programs, and many a dance had its music from Joe and one of his sisters, who played the organ. The farm had since spread to several hundred acres of hay and grain. Its first water had come from a spring, and by 1965 several wells were pumping irrigation water as well. The Arbons' Pocatello home dated from 1948, and he was a high priest in that city's Fourteenth Ward.

He was still busy at 89. When his grandsons climbed Bannock Peak in June 1965, he went along on horseback. Over the summer he painted a house at the farm, raised a large garden and looked after a strawberry patch. He had given up breaking horses, for harness or for the saddle, only two years earlier.

The article listed his family as his wife; two sons, Joseph G. Arbon of Pocatello and Dr. Harold Arbon of Salinas, Calif.; a daughter, Mrs. Delta Harmon; a sister, Mrs. Evan Winton of Gardena, Calif.; nine grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.