From 1913 to 1924, the Latter-day Saints at the Summit end of Arbon Valley, the high dry-farming country between Arbon and Buist, were led by Joseph Benson, a farmer from Logan, Utah. He presided over the Canyon Branch from 1913 and was bishop of the Summit Ward until 1924, and his wife, Louise, according to her obituary, kept the ward's records and led its Primary. The weekly papers noticed the Bensons only in passing while they lived there. Their fullest stories were printed after they had gone home to Logan, in his obituary of 1941 and hers of 1944.
By way of Sweden and New Zealand
Joseph Benson was born in Logan on July 13, 1865, a son of Mary Knight Benson and Ezra T. Benson, one of the church's early apostles. His obituary in the Salt Lake Telegram says he served a mission in Germany from 1902 to 1905 and afterward moved from Logan to Arbon to farm. The year of the move is lost in the digitized text.
His wife was Sigred Louise Larson, called Louise in her own obituary in the Logan Herald Journal. She was born on January 30, 1871, at a place in Sweden the paper spelled Swedberga. When she was three her parents took her and two other children to New Zealand, where the family lived eleven years and joined the Latter-day Saints before coming to America and settling in Logan. His obituary dates their marriage September 24, 1890; hers says they were married in the Logan Temple in 1891. They had eight children, two of whom died young.
The Canyon Branch and the Summit Ward
Andrew Jenson's Encyclopedic History of the Church, published in 1941, dates the congregation. The Saints at the south end were organized as the Canyon Branch on June 15, 1913, with Joseph Benson as presiding elder. On November 15, 1915, the branch became the Summit Ward, a full congregation with Benson as its bishop, its lay leader. That year it passed from the Malad Stake to the Curlew Stake. Jenson put the ward's center at the schoolhouse about six miles southwest of Arbon, in country about 5,500 feet high where most of the farming was dry farming, with some irrigation from pump wells, and Louise's obituary says the family "operated a dry farm" there for many years.
In June 1914 the Salt Lake Telegram listed Joseph Benson of Canyon among a committee of farmers from the Bannock, Curlew, Blue Creek and Pocatello valleys who meant to ask the Oregon Short Line for a branch railroad. Later that summer the American Falls Press reprinted the Salt Lake Herald-Republican's report of their meeting in Salt Lake City, where "Joseph Benson of Canyon, Idaho" was among those present:
Free right of way and a substantial freight bonus in return for the expense of constructing sixty miles of railroad through Blue Creek, Pocatello, Curlew and Bannock valleys to American Falls were the inducements offered to the Oregon Short Line by a committee of farmers who met yesterday afternoon with E. E. Calvin, vice president and general manager, and D. R. Gray, assistant general freight agent, says the Herald-Republican.
By the committee's account, both officials thought favorably of the project and would soon go to look over the proposed route; the papers read for this post do not report what the railroad finally decided.
The Press's South Arbon column, which covered the Summit neighborhood, gives a few glimpses of the family in 1915. A Guy Benson, almost certainly the Bensons' son, was teaching there; in June he treated his pupils to a picnic at a ranch in the mountains, and in September he was at work on the new schoolhouse that became Highland School. The 1960 obituary of their son Joseph Guy Benson says he taught elementary school in Arbon before moving to Malad in 1916. That September Mrs. Joe Benson gave a party for two young women, one of them a visitor from Logan, and "the evening was spent in various kinds of games." In November Joseph Benson went with neighbors to the church conference at Stone, in Curlew Valley.
The bishop's wife
Louise Benson's obituary gives her a large share of the work. When her husband became bishop, it says, she "gave her entire efforts to help," serving for fifteen years as ward clerk, who kept the ward's records, and as president of the Primary, the church's organization for children. Fifteen years is longer than his time as bishop, and the obituary does not say which years it counts.
In the papers read for this post she appears only as Mrs. Joe Benson. In August 1922 the South Arbon column noted that "Bishop and Mrs. Joe Benson attended conference at Snowville last Saturday and Sunday," a trip across the line into Utah.
Back to Logan
Jenson records that Ammon A. Sorensen succeeded Benson as bishop in 1924. Joseph's obituary agrees on 1924 but dates the start of his term to 1916, not 1915. The family went back to Logan in 1929, and the Summit Ward did not long outlast them. Jenson says it was discontinued on May 18, 1930, when 25 of its remaining members were sent to the Mount View Ward at Buist and 61 to the Arbon Ward. The site's Summit history remembers the congregation as the Canyon Branch to the end, with about sixty families going to Holbrook and Arbon.
In Logan, Joseph worked in the Logan Temple until his last illness, and he died at home on June 5, 1941, at 75. Louise became, in her obituary's words, "an ardent Relief society worker." She died early in January 1944 at the Malad home of her daughter, Mrs. Don L. Peck, and after a funeral in the Logan Fifth Ward chapel she was buried in the Logan city cemetery.
On this site: the Stories entries on the first congregations at Summit and the first school at Summit, and the area histories of Summit and Buist.
Sources
- Salt Lake Telegram, June 25, 1914, page 9
- American Falls Press, July 30, 1914, page 1
- American Falls Press, June 17, 1915, page 1
- American Falls Press, September 16, 1915, page 2
- American Falls Press, November 11, 1915, page 5
- American Falls Press, August 17, 1922, page 5
- Salt Lake Telegram, June 6, 1941, page 29
- Logan Herald Journal, January 11, 1944, page 4
- Logan Herald Journal, January 18, 1960, page 3
- Andrew Jenson, Encyclopedic History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1941), Summit Ward