In October 1959 three-year-old David Earl Stohl was killed on his family's farm at Arbon, in Power County, Idaho, when he was caught in the power auger his father was using to load grain. The family had come from Tremonton, in northern Utah, and the news was carried by two Utah papers, the Ogden Standard-Examiner and the Tremonton Leader.
David was the son of Earl H. and Orpha Heppler Stohl. He had been born on September 6, 1956, at Fallbrook, California. The Ogden paper gave the family's home as Arbon, formerly Tremonton, and said they had lived in Arbon for a year. The Leader said the family was then living in Logan, Utah, where the children went to school, but would "spend their summers on the farm in Idaho." They were not the only valley family to spend part of the year in town for schooling: Guy and Hazel Bolingbroke of Pauline bought a home in Pocatello in 1947 so their eldest could go to high school.
The fullest account of the accident is the Leader's, which rests on the word of H. L. Davis, the Power County coroner. Earl Stohl and a hired man were loading grain from a granary into a truck with a power auger, a turning screw inside a tube that carries grain up from a hopper at its lower end. David dropped a toy shovel into the hopper and reached for it. His right hand was caught, and he was pulled into the auger "before it could be stopped." The Ogden paper said only that he "fell into a grain conveyor" on the family ranch. The Leader did not name the hired man.
Besides his parents, David left five sisters, named in both papers as Marco, Carolyn, Barbara Ann, Sara Marie and Susan, and his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. R. Z. Heppler of Tremonton. His funeral was held on Saturday, October 24, in the Latter-day Saint chapel of the Tremonton Second Ward. Bishop Garfield conducted it, called O. I. Garfield in the Leader and Irvin Garfield in the Ogden paper. David was buried in Riverview Cemetery at Tremonton.
The two papers do not agree on the day he died. The Ogden Standard-Examiner, an evening paper printed on Friday, October 23, said he had been killed "yesterday," which would mean Thursday, October 22. The Leader, six days later, said "Friday morning." Because the Ogden paper, written that same Friday, already placed the death on the day before, Thursday seems the more likely day, but no death record or Idaho newspaper report has been found to settle it. The Leader also spells his birthplace "Fallsbrook."
The family was still in Arbon Valley a year later. In November 1960 the Tremonton Leader noted that Mr. and Mrs. Heppler, with Mr. and Mrs. Dan Briggs, had spent a Sunday in Arbon Valley visiting Earl Stohl and his family. The papers found so far do not say where in the valley the farm lay, exactly when the Stohls took it up, or how long they kept it.
On this site: the Stories of the valley's tragedies tell of other children killed in farm and harvest accidents: Vaughn Jenson, under a disc in 1919; Ila Peterson, three, run over by a truck hauling grain at Pauline in 1925; and Duane Orison, lost in a slide of wheat in 1943 as his father loaded a truck from the granary.