The 1967 Arbon Valley reunion and the families who had moved away

In July 1967 a short notice in the Logan Herald Journal invited every former resident of Arbon Valley, the farming valley southwest of Pocatello, and anyone whose parents had ever lived there, to a reunion at 7:30 on a Friday evening in the Arbon Valley chapel. A barbecue-beef dinner "and all the trimmings" would be served for a small charge.

The notice ran on Monday, July 10, so the reunion was probably on Friday, July 14. In the machine-read (OCR) text its lines are tangled with wire stories, and nothing more about the gathering can be made out. No report of the evening has been found. Forty-three years later, in 2010, an Arbon Reunion again invited anyone with ties to the valley; nothing read shows whether reunions were held in between.

The notice names no one. But obituaries and profiles printed between 1966 and 1969 show where five families who took up land in the valley before 1920 had gone, how far some had moved and how near others stayed.

From Crystal to Pocatello

In November 1917 the Crystal column of the American Falls Press noted that Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Culbertson had visited "Mrs. Culbertson's mother," Mrs. Hottel. In August 1918 his name was on the Red Cross honor roll of Power County men in the service. In September 1925 H. H. Culbertson's land in the Crystal township was on a delinquent-tax notice, a few years before drought and debt emptied most of Crystal and Buist.

When he died in a Pocatello hospital on November 6, 1966, at 77, the Salt Lake Tribune gave his name as Henry H. Culbertson. Its notice says he was born in Muncie, Indiana, married Jaretha Hottel, homesteaded an Arbon Valley farm, worked (as far as the jumbled text can be read) for the Pocatello school district until 1941, and was at the Naval Ordnance Plant from 1941 until he retired. The first names differ, but the initials, the Crystal land and the Hottel marriage make it very probable he is the same man.

A farmer and musician

Lorenzo H. Bailey's life is told in his family history. In the fall of 1923 the American Falls Press printed notices that the sheriff would sell land of Lorenzo and Chloa Bailey, including 480 acres with three shares of Arbon Irrigation Company stock, under a mortgage foreclosure. The papers read do not say how the sale ended; in 1925 land in his name was still on the county's delinquent-tax list. When he died in a Pocatello hospital in May 1967, at 87, the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune described him as a former Arbon Valley farmer and a musician. His sons were then in Nampa, Lava Hot Springs and Arbon Valley, his daughters in Pocatello, Idaho Falls and elsewhere in Idaho, and he had 35 grandchildren. The obituaries give his birth year as 1879 (the Deseret News reads December 13, the Tribune December 12); the family history gives December 12, 1880.

The bishop's son

Milton M. Evans was a son of Lorenzo B. Evans, a former bishop of the Arbon ward, and his wife Anna (see the Evans family). In March 1920 the notes from Arbon's Central school in the American Falls Press put a Milton Evans, very probably this one, on the winning side of a debate:

The pupils of the seventh and eighth grades debated Monday: "Resolved That the Wastes of the Barnyard Are Greater Than Those of the Kitchen." The affirmative side, composed of Edna Bailey, Fern Bullock, Milton Evans, and Willis Bullock: negative, Margaret Allard, Constance Evans, Earl Ripley and Walter Evans. The affirmatives won the debate.

Milton married Mary Dalpino on December 15, 1928. When his father died in May 1934, the Pocatello Tribune listed nine children: four at Arbon, four in Pocatello, Milton among them, and one in Malad. When Milton died in a Pocatello hospital on September 10, 1968, at 63, the Deseret News said he had been born at Arbon on November 4, 1904, and was shop foreman at J. R. Simplot's in Pocatello. His brothers and sisters were then at Bannock Creek, in Pocatello and Lava Hot Springs, and as far off as Nevada; one sister, Anna, Mrs. Arch Orison, was still at Arbon.

A cabin southwest of Arbon

In November 1917 the American Falls Press's roving farm writer, "the Pilgrim," wrote about R. Thyberg, whose quarter section lay five and a half miles southwest of the Arbon post office. Five years earlier, by his account, Thyberg had cut and hauled the logs and built his cabin alone. "His family in the meantime lived in the cabin of Richard Iverson, brother of Mrs. Thyberg."

Devere Thyberg was born at Arbon on September 23, 1913, a son of Rudolph and Martha Jane Iverson Thyberg, very probably the household the Pilgrim described. His obituary in the Deseret News of October 8, 1969, says he died in a Pocatello hospital at 56 after a long illness and had worked for Hawkes Transfer and the P.F.E., probably the Pacific Fruit Express refrigerator-car line.

From Buist to Bountiful

In October 1911 the Logan Republican reported that Charles Hughes and a Miss Hughes had gone to their homesteads at Buist, Idaho. This was probably Charles W. Hughes, a Mendon man. A 1969 Davis County Clipper profile of his son H. Preston Hughes, born in 1911, said the family had known "true pioneer life" on the homestead at Arbon: before he was twelve he had sole charge of three horses, and the children rode four miles on horseback to an old two-room schoolhouse. Another son, Austin, was born at Arbon on November 2, 1918.

The family went back to Utah about 1923. On August 14, 1935, Charles W. Hughes, 54, was struck and killed by a Bamberger electric train south of Farmington. The Logan Herald Journal said he had lived in Centerville for twelve years and at Arbon before that; his widow Lettie and their children Owen, Herman, Preston, Lois and Austin survived him.

Austin L. Hughes had been a pilot in the Second World War and the Korean War and was a field superintendent for a construction company. He died of a heart attack on July 2, 1966, at 47, and Hill Air Force Base gave him military rites at his burial in Bountiful. By 1969 Preston was a Bountiful city councilman, and as a bishop he had organized the Bountiful Sixth Ward.

Except for the Hughes family, the papers read for this post do not clearly say when these families left the valley, and none of them says why.

On this site: the Bailey family, the Evans family and the area history of Buist.