In the spring of 1914 the news of Arbon reached print by a roundabout road. A store in American Falls published a monthly paper, the Sheep Store News, with items from a correspondent in Bannock Valley. Twice that spring the American Falls Press reprinted the paper's Arbon news, which shows the valley at the end of a snowy winter.
A store's paper
The Sheep Store was the American Falls store of the Fall Creek Sheep Company. Arbon had been in Power County, with its seat at American Falls, since 1913; before that the valley was in Oneida County, where Summit and Buist remained.
On April 23, 1914, the Press printed a sample page of the store paper's April issue, Vol. II, No. 5, with a coupon offering the News free for a year. Its want column had an ad from the valley: Mrs. D. B. Evans of Arbon had a span of three-year-old mules for sale. In February the Press blamed its own slowness for the late arrival of the News, so the newspaper office probably printed it.
The Arbon items printed on April 2 included a notice. Anyone wishing "news items, want ads. or sale ads or any other 'want' published in the Sheep Store News" was to leave word for the correspondent at the Arbon post office. The April items, printed on April 30, carried her name: "(Mrs. E. A. Logan, Correspondent)". She was Jennie Logan, wife of the homesteader Ellis A. Logan; three years later she wrote the valley's first history for the Press. The February and March items are unsigned, but they were probably hers too.
February and March
The items "For February and March" begin in deep winter. Mr. Walker, the teacher at the South End school, was planning a literary society: "The roads have been almost impassable up there, and many people have got around on skiis." There was a public dance every Friday night in the Central school hall, where on March 20 the district's young people gave an entertainment and danced until late.
It was a season of surprise parties:
- T. B. Evans on February 16, his birthday;
- Nina Keeler and N. Lishman, both on February 18;
- his daughter Ruth Evans on March 3, when her friends met at her sister Mrs. Add. Affleck's and went on to the Evans home.
The column ranked Tom Evans's party first:
The leading social event of the season was the surprise party given to Mr. T. B. Evans on Monday, February 16th, the occasion being his birthday. The plans had been guarded so secretly that "Tom" was completely surprised when the friends began to gather.
Mr. and Mrs. "Ren" Evans (the scanned text reads "Earns") had a baby girl on March 4. She was probably the Margaret listed among Lorenzo and Anna Evans's children as born in 1914. Three days later the Morris Johnsons had their first girl. Lizzie Bailey, the two-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lorin Bailey, broke her left arm in a fall from a chair. She was taken to a physician at Malad and was doing well.
The telephone was coming. Its directors met at the Central school; an Affleck, probably Add. (first name lost in the scanned text), was installing phone boxes in subscribers' homes; and meanwhile:
Several parties who were interested in the telephone are busy putting up their share of the pole line. Several have their phone boxes in their homes, and are talking over the barb wire to their friends and neighbors until the main line is connected up with them.
The site's account of the first telephones knows barbed-wire telephones only from family memory; this column, written at the time, shows them in use, though not whose wire it was.
Land was still wanted: "Several Arbonites made a rush to the land offices to secure more land under the new law which came into effect February 21st." The Farmers' Society of Equity "held a rousing meeting" on March 14. The new Highland Congregational church, on land Miss Mamie Nunnelley gave about twelve miles south of the Central school, was serving as the schoolhouse that term, before the Highland school was built beside it in 1915. A resident pastor had been engaged for the valley's two new Congregational churches: Rev. Thomas Dent Fee of Eagle Butte, South Dakota.
Mr. Ed. Davis, "proprietor of the new store opened lately", was busy freighting supplies to his customers, and "Davis' store and the Noble Kowallis store have in a fine stock of supplies and keep busy handling most of the trade of the valley." He was probably Edward H. Davis. His family dated the store to 1910. Mrs. Logan's 1917 history said he had opened it "about two years ago", and the site's account of the first stores dates his general store about 1915, yet early in 1914 the Arbon column already called it new. The Noble Kowallis store was probably the store at Pauline, still known by the partnership's name, although the partnership had ended in November 1913.
An undated item in the column recorded the thaw; a Chinook is a warm, dry wind that melts snow quickly.
The snow is disappearing fast these days since the last rain, and Chinook winds. Many fields are bare and beginning to show up green. Sleighing will soon be a thing of the past. A few busy farmers who are anxious to commence spring work are plowing.
April
The April items touch the correspondent's own family. Miss Gena Rust, at high school in Pocatello, spent the first week of April in Arbon with her parents during the spring vacation. The Press later called her Mrs. Logan's sister and named Mrs. Logan's parents as Mr. and Mrs. Paul Rust. As Mrs. Gena Newport she would later keep the valley's telephone switchboard. Mrs. Logan herself had been operated on for appendicitis at the Pocatello General Hospital on April 7 and was home again. Another item, badly damaged, offered Mr. Rust's farm for sale.
Mr. and Mrs. T. B. Evans went to Logan, Utah, for the funeral of Isaac Smith, a relative of Mrs. Evans; the word that says how is unreadable. On April 6 a school election at the Central school house chose a trustee, whose name is also unreadable, in place of J. R. Bailey. Rev. Fee arrived on April 4 and preached his first sermon the next day.
No copy of the Sheep Store News has turned up in the collections searched for this post. Its news of the valley survives because the Press reprinted it.
On this site: the Evans family and the Arbon area.
Sources
- American Falls Press, February 5, 1914, page 5
- American Falls Press, April 2, 1914, page 11
- American Falls Press, April 23, 1914, page 6
- American Falls Press, April 30, 1914, page 1
- American Falls Press, August 12, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 29, 1917, page 7
- American Falls Press, December 5, 1919, page 3