On Saturday, February 8, 1930, wheat growers from Power County met in the chamber of commerce hall at Pocatello to hear how they could join the Federal Farm Board's new grain-marketing system. The men from Arbon Valley came away with a committee of their own. Arbon had been in Oneida County until 1913 and in Power County since then; the south end of the valley around Buist stayed in Oneida County.
The Farm Board was still new. It had been set up under the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, part of President Herbert Hoover's response to falling crop prices, with a revolving fund of half a billion dollars. For wheat it worked through the growers' own marketing co-operatives: a local unit in each district, joined to a larger regional association.
A committee for Arbon Valley
County Agent L. E. Tillotson explained the plan for forming a local unit. The Salt Lake Tribune printed the Pocatello report the next morning:
The farmers from Arbon valley in Power county appointed an organization committee to draw up resolutions and a constitution for the group. … From an estimate of the 20 growers it was estimated that 155,000 bushels of wheat was grown by that group annually.
That, it was believed, was enough grain to form a local. As the Tribune printed them, the committeemen were Lester Hubbard, Joe Evans, a Carl whose surname is broken in the scan ("Ru-", with the next column beginning "ble"), Ed Davis, Joe Arbon, William Allard and Roy Linden. Another name may have been lost at the same break. No Carl Ruble has turned up in the valley records; the name is possibly Carl Rudeen, who in March 1927 had served on a committee of Arbon Valley growers that met at the same chamber of commerce, with Tillotson presiding, about a community wheat warehouse. "Roy Linden" is possibly Roy Lindley, an Arbon farmer, but the paper does not say so. Nor does it say which Joe Evans or Ed Davis it meant; the Evans and Davis families each had more than one man of that name at Arbon. Joe Arbon was probably Bishop Joseph N. Arbon of the Arbon family for whom the valley is named; the family history calls him a wheat-committee man.
On the same page, a Farm Board representative, Leo Stuhr, told Twin Falls County farmers that a local had to organize by its own efforts, provide storage and show something concrete before it could expect a federal loan. Because southern Idaho wheat went to the Ogden market, through the region's business ties with the Utah terminals, he said, growers there would do better to join the intermountain regional association than the more remote one in the Pacific Northwest.
"Two typical groups of heavy producers"
Ten days later, on Tuesday, February 18, the directors of the Intermountain Grain Growers, Inc., met at the Bannock hotel in Pocatello. They named W. H. Barrett of Salt Lake general manager, and he and the company's secretary, J. W. Wade, were to begin a campaign to organize locals across Utah and Idaho. The Tribune reported:
Every county within the two states that grows enough grain to make a showing will be organized. As yet according to Mr. Wade there are no accepted locals but the next few weeks should develop many units to push the federal marketing scheme through for its initial trial.
Wade said the amount of wheat needed for a local would vary. A few groups already had crops pledged, running from 100,000 to 200,000 bushels, and Arbon Valley was named as one of "two typical groups of heavy producers." The scan has lost the name of the other district.
That summer the crop came in. On August 8, 1930, the Tribune reported from American Falls that wheat was pouring by the truckload into the warehouses there, with the harvest well under way in the Arbon Valley, Rockland and Pleasant Valley districts. The wheat the paper called "Power county red," "the favorite plant of the wheat farmer in this section," was comparatively free of smut and other disease, and the elevators were grading in three shifts.
The papers found so far do not say whether the Arbon Valley local was accepted, how much of that crop it handled, or how its members fared.
After the Farm Board
In 1933 the Farm Board was renamed the Farm Credit Administration. That May the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the AAA, which paid farmers not to plant part of their land. In the valley the program ran through committees of local farmers, and several of the 1930 names turn up again. The Arbon family history on this site lists the wheat-allotment committees from 1933 on: for Arbon, Roy Lindley, J. N. Arbon, John Anderson and Ed Davis, and for Pauline, E. C. England, William Allard and M. V. Tallon.
How drought and debt emptied Crystal and Buist in those years, and federal land purchases took in much of the south end, is told in Drought and debt empty Crystal and Buist.
Because the county line still crossed the valley, its farmers were organized from two county seats. By May 1937 J. W. Webster, Oneida County's agent, had organized committees to run that year's soil conservation program there. The community chairman chosen for "Arbon and Buist" was A. M. Orrison, probably Archie M. Orison of Arbon. In October 1939 the Oneida committee called the AAA committee election for Arbon and Buist farmers at the Arbon school house.
On the Power County side, the committees named in November 1939 for the 1940 conservation program had C. C. Payne as Arbon's chairman, E. C. England as vice chairman and Ray O. Burge as the third member, with Charles Allard and S. Keeler as alternates. Chester Smith headed Crystal's committee. Each community's farmers named their chairman as delegate to the county meeting at American Falls, where county officers were to be elected, and Payne was then the county committee's vice chairman. According to the site's family histories, he became county AAA chairman in 1941 and War Board chairman in 1942.
On this site: the Buist area history, and the Stories entry on the first 4-H club and Grange, which dates a Pauline 4-H club to 1932; William Allard chaired the committee that organized the Grange in 1933.
Sources
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 1927, page 11
- Salt Lake Tribune, February 9, 1930, page 17
- Salt Lake Tribune, February 19, 1930, page 24
- Salt Lake Tribune, August 8, 1930, page 20
- Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 1937, page 13
- Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 23, 1939, page 7
- Salt Lake Telegram, November 4, 1939, page 19
- Wikipedia, "Federal Farm Board"
- Wikipedia, "Agricultural Adjustment Act"