Charles and Grace Bailey's four years at Arbon, 1901–1905

In the spring of 1901 Charles A. Bailey of Wellsville, in Utah's Cache Valley, made the first homestead entry on the Arbon floor. He died four years later, and his widow, Grace Spence Bailey, took their children back to Wellsville. The family's short stay is pieced together here from a few lines in the newspapers of 1903 and from notices printed long after.

Coming to Arbon

Charles Adamson Bailey was a half-brother of J. R. Bailey, the first of the Bailey brothers in the valley (see the Bailey family). When the township on the valley floor opened to entry, he filed at the Blackfoot land office on March 28, 1901, the first homestead entry in township 11 South, 33 East. Arbon was then in Oneida County, as it would be until Power County was formed in 1913. His land lay in the heart of the Arbon floor.

Grace Spence had been born in Scotland in 1866 and came to Wellsville with her parents at six. She and Charles married in the Logan temple on January 13; her 1946 birthday notice gives the year as 1887, Find a Grave as 1888. That notice says they moved to Arbon in 1901. Their daughter Johanna, called Josie, was born at Arbon on May 13, 1902. An older daughter, Bessie, had been born at Wellsville in 1890. The notice of her golden wedding in 1959 says she went to school in Wellsville and at Arbon, and her obituary of 1974 says she spent her life in Wellsville apart from "a short time she homesteaded with her parents in Arbon."

Seen in the Arbon column

In 1919 the American Falls Press reprinted items from its own first volume, when it was the American Falls Advertiser, and some of the 1903 Arbon news it reprinted concerns this family. In August 1903 the Arbon writer reported that Bessie Bailey, who had been "poorly" for some time, had been out the Sunday before and was looking much better. A column reprinted the next month had more news of illness. Its heading, as the copy reads, dates it September 1902, but the series ran sixteen years back, so it is probably from September 1903:

The little daughter of C. A. Bailey who has been sick for some time is improving in health. The balance of the people at Arbon are enjoying good health at present.

It does not say which daughter. That December the column showed the family going back and forth to Cache Valley:

Wm Bailey has returned to Wellsville for the winter. C. A. Bailey and wife returned from Cache Valley this week. The weather remains beautiful but we have frosts at night.

William was probably Charles's brother William A. Bailey, who had entered a homestead on the Arbon floor in December 1902.

On February 25, 1904, Charles received the final certificate on his homestead. This was "proving up": having lived on and worked the land as the homestead law required, he could claim title from the government.

March 1905 and after

Charles A. Bailey died on March 22, 1905, at forty. Grace's 1946 notice says he died at Arbon. Find a Grave gives Wellsville as the place of death and records his burial in the Wellsville Cemetery. No report of his death from 1905 has been found, and nothing read gives its cause.

Grace then went back to Wellsville. The notices do not give the year she left, but Josie's eightieth-birthday notice in 1982 says Josie had lived in Wellsville from the age of three, which puts the family there by 1905 or 1906. The site's Bailey family page, drawing on family accounts, has them at Arbon "for some years" after 1901, so when they left is not certain. The government issued the patent for Charles's homestead on January 30, 1906, after his death.

The land took longer to settle. In December 1917 Joseph N. Arbon, as administrator of the estate of Charles A. Bailey, called on creditors to present their claims. In April 1918 the probate court of Power County set a hearing for May 14 at American Falls on his request to sell "the whole of the real estate of said deceased, at private sale." The papers read do not report the sale or say why Joseph N. Arbon was the administrator. The Bailey family history says J. R. Bailey later bought his half-brother's homestead.

By 1946, when the South Cache Courier marked her eightieth birthday, Grace Bailey had been a widow for forty-one years. She was the mother of eight children, six of them then living: Charles, Mark, George, Floyd, Bessie (Mrs. William P. Leatham) and Josie (Mrs. Thomas B. Poppleton). The paper added that for many years she had served as a midwife and had helped bring more than three hundred children into the world. It does not say where, so whether she delivered any babies during her years at Arbon is not known. She died in 1948. Bessie died in 1974 and Josie in 1986.

On this site: the Bailey family, James R. Bailey, the Arbon family, and the Stories entries on the first homestead entries and the first midwives.