Arbon Valley wheat farms in the want ads, 1946–1959

In the years after the Second World War, wheat farms in Arbon Valley, in Power County, Idaho, were offered for sale in the classified columns of Utah newspapers, from Ogden and Salt Lake City to Logan and Tremonton. Few of the ads name an owner, and no report has been found that any of these farms sold. Read together, they show what a valley dry farm had become by mid-century: how big it was, what came with it, and what was asked for it.

The valley had been homesteaded in quarter sections of 160 acres. At Buist, as the Buist history puts it, there were four families on every square mile. In November 1917 the American Falls Press recorded what the six sons of Andrew Andersen, in the valley since 1893, held between them. The paper spelled the name Anderson:

they own a total of 1520 acres of Arbon valley land and lease 160 acres besides. This year they had around 700 acres in wheat and about 40 in alfalfa.

Within thirty years, single farms of that size were being advertised.

1946: "One man job except in harvest"

For ten days in March 1946 the Ogden Standard-Examiner carried a listing under the heading "Idaho Ranches," apparently placed by the Ogden broker A. G. Holland. It offered a 1,440-acre dry farm in Arbon Valley with 700 acres in fall wheat (winter wheat, sown in autumn) that the ad said should harvest $25,000. A full line of big equipment and six new granaries went with it. The price was $75,000, about $52 an acre, with $35,000 down and easy terms on the rest.

At the end of the month a second ad in the same paper offered a 1,380-acre Arbon Valley dry farm with 540 acres of fall wheat, a house, barn, shop and garage, and Taylor grazing for 35 head: a permit to graze that many head on federal range under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. It was "fully equipped with big machinery in very good condition," for $73,500, with $42,500 down. The ad pitched it to an investor, with "a good chance" of what the scans print as 26 net in six months (one copy reads 25), presumably a percentage. One line summed up the work: "One man job except in harvest."

Granaries and hillside combines, 1949–1953

In March 1949, while the valley was still snowed in by the winter of 1948–49, DeMar Taylor of Malad advertised in two Box Elder County papers a 1,360-acre Arbon Valley farm, 1,100 acres of it farmed and 550 in fall grain, with a good modern home and storage for 12,000 bushels of grain. The price was $75,000. In June another ad ran for two weeks in the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Logan Herald Journal: an Arbon Valley dry farm of 1,160 acres, 670 of them in wheat, with complete equipment, from a seller who gave a Pocatello box number.

Machinery was offered too. In July 1949 F. E. Sorensen of Arbon advertised a "Rumley No. 3" hillside combine, in good condition with plenty of extras. A hillside combine kept its threshing works level on sloping fields. The seller was probably Franklin E. Sorensen, whose 1963 obituary says he homesteaded in Arbon Valley and ran a dry farm there. In June 1952 D. J. Purdy of Arbon offered a Caterpillar D4 tractor and a John Deere 36 combine in excellent condition.

Smaller places came up as well. In May 1950 a Salt Lake realty ad listed 480 acres in Arbon Valley, in hay and grain, for $30,000. In April 1953 a Logan ad offered a 640-acre dry farm at the south end of the valley, with 550 acres cultivated and 230 sown to winter wheat, "up, good stand."

Allotments and a $160,000 farm

By the mid-1950s the ads had a new selling point. Under the federal wheat program of those years, each farm had an allotment, the acreage of wheat it could plant without penalty, figured from its past plantings. In September 1954 a Salt Lake ad offered an Arbon Valley wheat farm with a "wheat allotment history," a good set of buildings on the highway and the equipment included. That November the Tremonton Leader advertised a 1,480-acre Arbon Valley dry farm in "one of the best dry farm districts in Idaho," adding that machinery could be included. In June 1955 Gerald Neal of Arbon advertised 960 acres, equipped, in the Logan Herald Journal. That summer a Salt Lake ad offered a complete, fully equipped 1,440-acre dry farm in "Idaho's choice area," with machine sheds and grain bins.

The most detailed of all ran in the Tremonton Leader on January 24, 1957. It offered 1,434 acres in Arbon Valley, 18 miles south of Pocatello, with 1,300 acres cultivated and a 447-acre wheat allotment. With the land went a tractor, combine, weeders, drills, a truck and a wheatland plow, a new home, six granaries, a shop, a garage and a large machine shed. The price was $160,000, with $40,000 down and the balance on a yearly contract. That is about $112 an acre, roughly twice the 1946 figure. But these were different farms, and the figures are asking prices, not sales. In March 1959 a 1,600-acre Arbon Valley farm with some new machinery was advertised on its record of over 36 bushels of wheat the year before, presumably to the acre, with the owner to carry the contract.

Who came

Some Utah families did come to the valley in the 1940s. In 1965, announcing the golden wedding of William and Esther Pope of Richmond, in Cache Valley, the Logan Herald Journal recalled that after years on a dairy ranch at Park City they had returned to Richmond in 1944. From there they ran ranches they owned in Arbon Valley and in Montana until he retired in 1958. A Vance Pope, probably their son, and his family had a home at Arbon by the spring of 1946. Another son, Max, moved to Arbon with his wife, Margaret, in 1947 and farmed dryland wheat there for many years. In 1956 he built a home at Arimo so his growing family could have better schooling.

Who owned the advertised farms, and who bought them, the papers do not tell. If you know, send it to the archive.

On this site: an earlier time when valley farms were foreclosed for debt is told in the foreclosures of 1920–1925. The Firsts tell of summer fallowing, the first combines and the first tractors.

Arbon Valley wheat farms in the want ads, 1946–1959

1946: "One man job except in harvest"

Granaries and hillside combines, 1949–1953

Allotments and a $160,000 farm

Who came

Sources

Connected histories

Buist