On November 28, 1973, the Idaho State Journal printed a short obituary from Los Angeles for Eva Arbon Andersen, 90, "formerly of Arbon." Readers were reminded that she was a daughter of the man whose surname the town bears. Eva was the youngest of George Arbon's seven children, and by then the last of them. Twenty years earlier the same paper had reported the death of her sister Mayme, who had very probably homesteaded at Arbon, later ranched there, and kept a hotel in Pocatello. Together the two notices mark the end of a generation in the family the valley is named for.
Six daughters and a son
George Arbon and Sarah Nicholas Arbon had six girls and a boy. Sarah died in 1886, when Eva was not yet three, and the eldest daughter, Emily, did much of the raising, as the George Dennis Arbon history tells it. The family came into Bannock Valley in the 1890s. Joe stayed and farmed, Esther married Edward H. Davis, Maggie went to Alberta, and Nancy died at Almo in 1908. When George Arbon died in 1921 (Grandpa Arbon dies), Mayme was at his bedside, and Eva was listed among the survivors as "Mrs. Eva Walsh, Pocatello."
Mayme
Martha Mary Ann Arbon, called Mayme, was born at Snowville, Utah, on December 23, 1876. She married Charles A. Johnston, at Almo in 1895 by the family records, and they had three children, Stella, Ethel and Charley. The marriage ended in divorce. By 1915 she was living at Arbon under her own name, very probably on a homestead of her own, and in July 1916 her house burned. In 1918 she married the neighbouring rancher Jerry Baker. They farmed at Arbon until about 1930, after which Pocatello's Carlyle hotel became their business, though the valley ranch stayed in their hands. Jerry Baker died at the hotel in January 1940; her obituary puts his death a year early, in 1939.
Mayme Baker, 76, died in her Pocatello house, by the paper's reckoning late on the night of Saturday, September 5, 1953. It was Monday before her children discovered her, and the news was in print on Tuesday. Her funeral was set for Thursday, September 10, at the Tenth Ward LDS church. A week later a card of thanks for "our beloved mother, Mayme Baker" appeared over the names of her daughter Stella Bailey, Ethel and her husband Cecil Davis, and Charles E. Johnston and his wife.
Her eldest sister had died only that spring. The Deseret News of June 1, 1953, carried the obituary of Emily Arbon Jones, 88, who died in Pocatello. As far as its blurred text can be read, it named among her survivors her brother Joseph Arbon and her sisters Mayme Baker and Esther Davis of Pocatello, Margaret King of Alberta, and, it seems, Eva, listed as Mrs. Winton of Los Angeles (the OCR reads her first name as "Zvi").
Eva
Sarah Eveline Arbon, known as Eva, was born in 1883. Her obituary gives Willard, Utah, as the place; the family history says Almo, Idaho. She came into the valley as a girl. The records gathered for this site show her marrying Charles H. Bird at Pocatello in May 1902, and, by the same records, her son Asael was born that month. She was probably the "Sarah Arbon Bird" who entered a homestead about a mile west of her father's in April 1904 (the Arbon family). She then married Ez Andersen. The county record dates that marriage to October 1904; her obituary says 1906. Two more sons followed: Nicholas, about 1905, and Harvey, born at Arbon in 1909.
In late January 1911, when a thaw and heavy rain flooded the creeks of the valley, the Andersens and the Dalton family were going home together at night when their box (a sleigh in one report, a wagon in another) overturned at a flooded crossing. The family account has them leaving a party at the Daltons'; the Stories entry says only that they were coming from a neighbour's. Eva and Mrs. Dalton held other children by their feet in the current, but Nicholas, five by his recorded birth date and six by the family account, and two Dalton children were swept away (the drowning). The obituary says Eva and Ez were divorced in 1913. Ez had remarried by 1919, and in 1920 Harvey was living at Arbon with his father.
After that, Eva's life shows up only in passing. In 1921 she was Mrs. Eva Walsh of Pocatello; by her obituary she moved to Los Angeles in 1922; in 1953 her sister's obituary apparently listed her as Mrs. Winton, the name that appears again in her own obituary. When her brother Joe died at 96 in Pocatello in September 1972, the Utah papers listed a single surviving sister, Mrs. Sarah Eveline of Torrance, California. Eva outlived him by fourteen months. Death came on Monday, November 26, 1973; of her sons, Asael, in Los Angeles, and Harvey, still at Arbon, were left.
What the papers leave out
The papers do not say who Walsh or Winton was, or whether either was a husband. Neither obituary says where its subject was buried. A family tree cited in the site's research has Eva dying at Pocatello on November 25, 1973, rather than at Los Angeles on the 26th, and her birthplace and second wedding year differ between her obituary and the records.
On this site: the Arbon family, George Dennis Arbon, Ez and Eva Andersen and the Arbon area.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 28, 1973, page 2, with the Idaho State Journal of September 8, 1953, page 12. The original articles are under copyright; this is our own report of what they said.
The Journal's brief notice, sent from Los Angeles, concerned a former Arbon woman, Eva Winton Arbon Andersen, who had died there at 90 on Monday, November 26, 1973. It did not let readers miss the family tie: her father was the Arbon behind the town's name.
By its account Willard, Utah, was her birthplace and 1883 her birth year, and Arbon became home while she was young. Her marriage to E. T. Andersen, dated there to 1906, ended in divorce seven years later. From 1922 on she lived in Los Angeles.
Two sons outlived her, Asael in Los Angeles and Harvey at Arbon. The family also counted three grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandchild. All five of her sisters were dead before her, as were her brother and one of her sons. The funeral was at Gardena, California, the same Wednesday the paper came out, though the notice spelled the place "Gardenia."
Twenty years earlier, on September 8, 1953, the same paper had carried the death of her sister, Mayme Arbon Johnston Baker, 76. It was Monday, September 7, before her children came upon her in her Pocatello house, already dead; the paper put the time of death at late Saturday night.
George and Sarah Nicholas Arbon were her parents, and she was born to them at Snowville, Utah, on December 23, 1876. Idaho had been her home since 1884. Her marriage to Charles A. Johnston ended in divorce. Jerry Baker became her second husband in 1918. Together they ran Pocatello's Carlyle hotel for a long stretch and had a ranch at Arbon besides. The paper dated his death to 1939.
She left a son and two daughters, Charles E. Johnston and Stella Bailey in Pocatello and Ethel Davis in Idaho Falls, along with 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. The Tenth Ward LDS church was the setting for the 2 p.m. Thursday funeral, with Bishop Clarence Richardson in charge; visitors were directed to the Hall-Grant mortuary.
Sources
- Idaho State Journal, November 28, 1973, page 2
- Idaho State Journal, September 8, 1953, page 12
- Idaho State Journal, September 15, 1953, page 14
- Deseret News, June 1, 1953, page 24
- Salt Lake Tribune, September 26, 1972, page 26
- Provo Daily Herald, September 26, 1972, page 4
- Sunday Tribune-Journal, January 28, 1940, page 12
- American Falls Press, April 1, 1921, page 1