On Monday, November 29, 1965, the Idaho State Journal printed a short obituary for Maurice Poppie, a retired farmer living in Pocatello. He had died the evening before at 71. In a few lines it sketched his life: birth at Paxico, Kansas, a family move west to Arbon Valley in 1909, and a long stretch on a valley farm that ended only a few years before he died. The older papers and the site's research fill in some of those years. The year 1909 agrees with his mother's obituaries of 1933.
From Kansas to Arbon
The Poppies had family already in the valley. Maurice's mother, Hannah, was a sister of Julius and Joseph Abter. Julius had been homesteading at Arbon since about 1901. In November 1908 he told the American Falls Press that his brother Joe of McFarland, Kansas, was among the newcomers, and that "his brother-in-law, Ernest Pappie, also of McFarland, is coming." The 1910 census found Ernest and Hannah Poppie at Arbon with Maurice and three of his brothers and sisters, next door to Joseph Abter.
In June 1917 the Press printed the names of the county's men who had registered for the draft. Under Arbon it listed "Maurice Roy" Poppie with his brothers Albert and Ernest. Ernest was in training at Camp Lewis by that winter. Maurice followed the next September; on September 17, 1918, the Arbon column said he "left a few days ago for Camp Lewis where he will go in training for Uncle Sam." In January 1919 the paper passed on news from him:
Mrs. Ernest Poppy received word from their son, Maurice, that while in France he saw his brother, Ernest, who is in service over there, and that Ernest, besides being wounded in the hand had two of his fingers shot off. He also had been gassed. Maurice had been in training in the U. S. and arrived over seas a few days after the armistice was signed.
Ernest's wounds are remembered among the valley's wartime casualties.
On August 7, 1919, Maurice received the land-office patent on his own homestead: 240 acres in Sections 30 and 31 of township 11 south, range 34 east, southeast of Arbon. That December the Press reported that he, David Ripley and Lucien McLarry had been walking home from Pocatello on a Saturday night after McLarry's car broke down, until William Allard picked them up "between Rattlesnake and Pauline." The cold of that month is told on the Stories page.
The ranch south of Pauline
In February 1924 the sheriff advertised a stray gray mare for sale "at the ranch of Maurice Poppie, 5 miles south of the Pauline post office." That winter the Poppies were near neighbors of Thomas Toyn when Toyn was shot by the boarder living with his family. The boarder, John Conway, had told the Poppies that he had taken the Toyns to Grouse Creek, Utah, which the neighbors soon found was untrue. At his hearing in March, the witnesses included a "Morris Popple," probably Maurice, and Ernest Poppie. Toyn recovered; the case is told under the 1924 Toyn shooting.
When Hannah Poppie died in West Pocatello in May 1933, the first notice said she died at Maurice's home there. A correction a week later said it was the home of a Palmer family at the same address.
Florence and the Johnsons
Family-history records say that in November 1935 Maurice married Florence Johnson, born Macy, at Elko, Nevada. Her son Frank Lynden Johnson and daughter Darthea lived with them at Arbon in 1940, along with Maurice's brother Ernest. Maurice was an alternate on the Arbon committee of the federal farm program in 1937 and 1938. In 1942 he was on the Arbon list for the county's wartime farm volunteer organization, and his stepson named him as his contact when he registered for the draft.
Frank Johnson married Loretta Walker, who became Arbon's postmaster in February 1947 and kept the office until 1984. That month the post office moved to the quarter section that Ernest Poppie Sr. had patented as his homestead in 1915. In 1950 the census found Maurice, Florence and Ernest at Arbon, with Frank and Loretta Johnson a few households away on the same page.
The obituary does not say when Maurice left the farm for Pocatello. It also leaves his surviving brother and sister unnamed. The brother may have been Ernest, who lived until 1981, or Albert, who also died in 1965 on a date not found here; no source read here says which. His mother's funeral in 1933 was led by a Catholic priest. His own was to be led by an Episcopal priest.
On this site: the Poppie family record; the Arbon area; his brother Frank's 1927 marriage to Catherine Andersen on the Andersen family page; and the 2013 memorial notice for Frank Johnson.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 29, 1965, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Maurice Poppie had been sick before his death at St. Anthony Hospital in Pocatello on the evening of Sunday, November 28, 1965. A retired farmer of 71, he made his home on North Eighth in the city.
Born in January 1894 at Paxico, Kansas, to Ernst and Johannah Poppie, he was a teenager when the family came west to Arbon Valley in 1909. He stayed on to farm in the valley and gave it up only a few years before he died.
His wife, Florence, survived him in Pocatello. So did his stepson, Frank Lynden Johnson, and Frank's wife, whose name the paper misprinted as Ooretta. Four grandchildren were also listed, and they and the Johnsons lived in Arbon Valley. A brother and a sister also survived him. The paper did not name them.
Services were set for 3 p.m. that Wednesday at the Manning Funeral Chapel. Leading them would be the Rev. Father James P. Trotter of Trinity Episcopal Church, and the burial was planned for Mountainview Cemetery.
Sources
- Idaho State Journal, November 29, 1965, page 2
- American Falls Press, November 7, 1908, page 1
- American Falls Press, June 19, 1917, page 8
- American Falls Press, January 8, 1918, page 3
- American Falls Press, September 17, 1918, page 8
- American Falls Press, January 17, 1919, page 10
- American Falls Press, December 5, 1919, page 3
- American Falls Press, February 28, 1924, page 7
- American Falls Press, March 6, 1924, page 1
- American Falls Press, March 13, 1924, page 1
- American Falls Press, March 20, 1924, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, May 25, 1933, page 12
- Pocatello Tribune, May 28, 1933, page 5
- Pocatello Tribune, May 29, 1933, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, June 1, 1933, page 10