Late in February 1970 the Idaho State Journal ran a short profile of Martha Jane Thyberg, who would turn 84 on March 3. She lived at Blackrock, south of Pocatello, and spent her winters in Las Vegas, but among the things she remembered was a homestead in Arbon Valley and the way she did the washing as a young wife.
An Iverson daughter
Martha was born at Paradise, in Cache County, Utah, in 1886, a daughter of Bernhart M. and Tirzah Iverson. She was still a girl when the Iversons left Paradise for Hyrum and, after that, Moreland, Idaho; a Blackfoot boarding house gave her work by the age of 16. In December 1909 she married Rudolph Thyberg at the courthouse in Pocatello, where he worked as a boilermaker for the Union Pacific.
Her family appears often on this site. From about 1910 her brothers Hans, George, Richard and Benjamin Iverson took up a block of homesteads on the south-west Arbon floor. Their mother, widowed in 1913, later proved up on a claim of her own, and the families of three of Martha's sisters, the Mathewses and the Infangers, farmed nearby. Rudolph's own homestead, a quarter section patented in 1916, lay inside that block.
A cabin built single-handed
The Thybergs' start in the valley comes from the American Falls Press's roving correspondent, the Pilgrim, whose column of November 9, 1917, described his visit. He found R. Thyberg finishing an addition to his log cabin, five and a half miles southwest of the Arbon post office. Thyberg had filed on a second quarter section farther southwest and meant to make wheat his main crop. The Pilgrim went on:
When he came here five years ago the first thing he did was to go into the mountains, cut his logs, snake them out and haul them to the homestead, and build the cabin—doing all this work single handed. His family in the meantime lived in the cabin of Richard Iverson, brother of Mrs. Thyberg.
That puts their arrival at about 1912. A son, Golden, was born at Arbon on September 23, 1913, and family records give another son, Roy, born there in 1915. The Central Arbon column of June 3, 1915, noted that John Payne and Mr. Thyberg had gone to Pocatello on business, and in 1916 Mr. Thyberg was named to the crew gathering brush for the bowery at the valley's Pioneer Day.
Washday by the creek
Martha's own memory of those years, as the 1970 article gave it, was of washday. Laundry, as a newlywed, meant a trip to her mother's place: the water was warmed on an open fire at the creekside, and the clothes were rubbed clean on a washboard.
The article does not say where her mother's place was. It places the memory just after the Arbon homestead, and Tirzah Iverson's homestead, patented in 1918, lay on the south-west floor just south of her sons' claims. But the family had earlier lived around Moreland and Blackfoot, and the article does not say whether her mother was already in the valley in the first years of the marriage, so the creek may have been elsewhere.
After the valley
The paper does not say when the Thybergs left Arbon. Their patent came through in 1916, and the site's family research finds a daughter, Marie, born in Pocatello in 1919. Blackrock, below Pocatello, became their home in 1933, according to the 1970 profile. Rudolph died in 1958. Family records give Martha's death at Las Vegas in 1977.
Golden, the Arbon-born son, was only 17 when he joined the Army in 1930, committing to two years. The Second World War took him back into uniform; his decorations from the fighting in Asia and the Pacific included a Purple Heart. His obituary in the Journal does not say where or how he was wounded. A long illness ended with his death at 56 on October 6, 1969, in a Pocatello hospital. The family planned a burial with military honors at the graveside in Mountain View Cemetery. His jobs over the years had included Hawkes Transfer and the Pacific Fruit Express.
On this site: A valley of log cabins gives more of the Pilgrim's 1917 tour, the 1967 reunion post follows the Thybergs and other families who moved away, and the Iverson family timeline and the Arbon area page place their homesteads.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, February 27, 1970, page 14 (Section D, page 1). The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Under an Inkom dateline, the Journal marked the approach of Martha Jane Thyberg's 84th birthday, which fell on March 3, 1970. For the occasion, her sons and daughters meant to take her out for dinner. The piece ran with two photographs of her, a wedding portrait and a recent one, and traced her life from Utah to Blackrock, south of Pocatello, where the Thybergs had moved in 1933.
Mrs. Thyberg was a Utah native, born at Paradise in Cache County on March 3, 1886. Her parents, Bernhart M. and Tirzah Iverson, had twelve children, and she was the fifth. Paradise was home for her first dozen years, and one thing she had not forgotten from that time was trudging three miles to school every day alongside her siblings. After Paradise came Hyrum, Utah, then Moreland, Idaho; at 16 she was earning wages at a Blackfoot boarding house.
Rudolph A. Thyberg, a Union Pacific boilermaker in Pocatello, was a friend of her brother-in-law, and that was how the two met. Martha was 23 at the time of their wedding, held at the old Pocatello courthouse on December 28, 1909. Cottage dances in Pocatello stood out in her memory of those first years. Their Arbon Valley homestead came years after the wedding, by the article's telling. The article also gave her recollection of laundry day from those years: creek water heated on a fire at her mother's place, and a washboard for the scrubbing.
In September 1947, on the 12th, the Thybergs went through a temple marriage at Idaho Falls. Rudolph died on May 29; the year is blurred in the print, and family records give 1958.
In the church she had been a longtime visiting teacher and had taught Sunday School, Mutual and theology classes. Genealogy had long occupied her too. At one time the PTA had her as its president, and she had also been a magazine representative.
Of the couple's six children, three had died by 1970: Violet (Mrs. Raymond Winder), Lester R. Thyberg and Golden D. Thyberg. Roy L. Thyberg was living in Pocatello, Irene (Mrs. Thomas Croxall) in Hawaii, and Marie Cobia at home with her mother in South Pocatello. By then the family had grown to 21 grandchildren and, a generation further on, 29 great-grandchildren.
From 1961 on, she had split the year: cold months with a daughter in Las Vegas, warm ones back home at Blackrock. Looking over the years, she told the paper her life "has been wonderful."