For half a century every telephone call in Arbon Valley went through one switchboard. From December 1915 it hung on a wall in the T. B. Evans home near the Central school, and it stayed in that house until December 1965, when the valley changed to dial telephones. On May 22, 1966, the Idaho State Journal marked the change with a feature by its correspondent Lena Anken Sexton, with a sidebar on Mrs. T. B. Evans and two photographs.
Two operators in one house
By the Journal's reckoning the board had served for fifty years, split evenly between two families: Mrs. T. B. Evans ran it for the first twenty-five and the Newports for the next twenty-five. Susannah Evans, as the site's post on her life tells, ran the central from the time the long-distance line reached the valley until she and her husband moved to Pocatello in 1940. The 1966 article credits her with a second job as well: on the hour, every hour, she let the airlines know how cloudy it was over Arbon, which mattered both to planes crossing the valley and to those using the Pocatello airport. It also passed on a memory of the 1918 influenza, when Tom Evans was the only one of his household still on his feet and nursed the rest while keeping the switchboard going.
The switchboard came with the house when Lee and Gena Newport bought the Evans place in 1940. Nights at the board were never part of the arrangement, the Journal noted, but emergencies got through all the same, and a neighbor with a call to place at an odd hour never found the Newports unwilling. A former valley child recalled on this site that the family's ring was three shorts and a long and that every call went through Gena Newport.
A petition in 1953
In July 1953 Mrs. Lee Newport, at whose house the switchboard stood, said the valley's outside line, which ran by way of American Falls, was out much of the time. Petitions were going around Arbon Valley and the Crystal district that month, according to a Journal dispatch from American Falls. They were addressed to the Idaho Public Utilities Commission and to the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company, and they sought two things: dial service, and a direct line of the valley's own into Pocatello. Thirty households were on the old system. Give the valley reliable service, the petitioners argued, and that number would climb to fifty, with at least another thirty coming from Crystal, a district the dispatch said had never had a telephone. That does not fit the line Crystal settlers built to Pocatello in 1917, which may have stopped working. No report of an answer has been found, and the switchboard stayed in the Newport kitchen for twelve more years.
The dial system
The drive that worked began, both 1966 accounts agree, with Claude Gibbons and a petition. For the work the valley turned to Lee May and his wife, who had long run the telephone company at Rockland, 56 miles off. Before starting they needed $6,000; according to the Journal, seven Arbon ranchers each advanced $1,000. The family accounts on this site remember Joe Arbon, Sod Williams and Claude Gibbons collecting $200 subscriptions from about thirty families. The Journal's price for existing subscribers was also $200. The project needed thirty subscribers and got thirty-five.
In July 1966 a Journal columnist, having read about the change in the Power County Press, filled in the dates. Working from a wheel tractor, the Mays and Lowell Havlicak of Rockland (the May article spells it Havlisak) put in 150 poles at a pace of about twenty a day, and ranchers whose land the line crossed lent a hand. A photograph with the May article shows the Mays resetting a pole on the Arbon line with a tractor lift Lee Newport had built for $45. Work began in the second week of September and was finished on December 11, the day the valley's last hand-switched call gave way to dialing. The columnist had first read of it in the Journal the previous winter, so the year was 1965. The whole job cost about $25,000.
Joe Arbon, aged 90, was the first to ring out of the valley long-distance once the dials were in. Father and son had settled there in 1895, the Journal said, back when the place was called Bannock Valley. Both 1966 pieces make clear this was Joseph Nicholas Arbon, the old settler. The May article says he signed the 1913 company's incorporation papers and that his was one of the seven $1,000 stakes behind the dial system, so the Joe Arbon of the subscription drive was probably the father too; the site's dial-phone entry had wondered whether he was the son, Joseph G.
The old switchboard's next home, the paper said, would be a museum: the Bannock County Historical Society's, then housed in Pocatello's old library building at the corner of Center and Garfield. Whether it is still there is not known.
One of the article's memories differs from the records. It credited Arbon's first long-distance call with bringing a doctor to H. E. Van Horn; the reports of December 1915 say the line's first use was a call to Salt Lake, and they name the injured man as M. D. Van Horn, who was cutting timber for his brother Hugh, so the 1966 version may have named the brother.
An epilogue in 1968
Less than three years after the change, the valley's line needed protecting from bird hunters. At the request of the valley's telephone users, the Idaho Fish and Game Department warned hunters ahead of the mourning dove opener on Sunday, September 1, 1968, that doves sitting on telephone wires were off limits. Hunters in past seasons had done real harm to the wires, sometimes cutting the line clean through so that no phone in the valley worked. The Journal printed the warning again ten years later in its look-back column.
On this site: the first dial telephones, the first telephone operator, Thomas Bowen Evans and Susannah Smith, the 1962 floods that cut the line and the Arbon area.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, May 22, 1966, page 6. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Arbon Valley numbers now appear in the Pocatello directory, and the phones that ring them have dials. For fifty years before that, nobody in Arbon Valley could reach anyone without going through one hand-worked switchboard.
The push began with Claude Gibbons, whose petition gathered names around the valley. The petitioners then went to Lee May and his wife, who had run Rockland's telephone system for many years; Rockland lies 56 miles from Arbon. The Mays wanted $6,000 up front, and seven Arbon ranchers contributed $1,000 each. Thirty-five people signed up, five more than the minimum of thirty. Every added subscriber lowered the cost to the rest. The current figure is $200 for those already on the line and $300 for newcomers who need a new line or spur, with a modest monthly fee collected every three months.
By the Mays' estimate, rebuilding and lengthening some 27 miles of line and keeping up the new switchboard would come to around $25,000. The couple did the work with their own hands, using a wheel tractor to set 150 poles, roughly twenty each day. For three months Lowell Havlisak of Rockland worked beside them, and ranchers living along the line gave their help.
Joe Arbon, 90, whose family settled the valley in 1895, placed the dial system's opening long-distance call. His name was on the 1913 incorporation papers of the Falls-Bannock Telephone Co., and decades later his $1,000 was part of what paid for the system that replaced it.
The old switchboard served the valley from the home first of Mr. and Mrs. T. B. Evans and later of the Lee Newports. For twenty-five years every call in the valley passed through Mrs. Evans's hands, and once an hour she told the airlines what the clouds over Arbon looked like. From 1940, when the Evans house became the Newports' home, the switchboard was their job for a quarter century. They never promised night service. Still, any emergency got an answer, and neighbors needing to call at odd hours found the Newports ready to help. The retired board is bound for the museum of the Bannock County Historical Society.
Looking back, the article said the valley's first telephone link joined two ranches, N. M. Allard's and Ed Keller's, using barbed-wire fence for its line, and it gave what the early poles, wire, batteries and insulators had cost. In its telling, Arbon's first long-distance call was made to get a doctor for H. E. Van Horn. In 1918, with influenza keeping the rest of the Evans family in bed, Tom Evans looked after them and ran the switchboard single-handed.