On June 29, 1911, voters in the lower part of the Arbon valley, then in Oneida County, were to decide two questions: whether to join their school districts into one, and whether to borrow money for a four-room schoolhouse on Tom Evans' place. The American Falls Press gave the vote a few lines. Its notices over the next two years show, in pieces, how the valley's Central school came to stand on Evans land.
District No. 46
Until Power County was formed in 1913, Arbon belonged to Oneida County, and its school was one of Oneida's numbered districts. The valley's first school had met in the log building the settlers raised in 1901–02, with Maude Evans as its teacher. When the Press printed the August 1907 school apportionment for "this end of the county," the valley's line read "Arbon No. 46, $132.41." It was the fourth-largest of the nine shares listed, after American Falls, one of the Rockland districts and Neeley.
By the next year the district apparently had more than one schoolhouse: in November 1908 a meeting to draw settlers to the valley was held "at the upper schoolhouse in Arbon." A 1938 campaign profile of Frank F. Durfey of Box Elder County, Utah, says that he had been a student at Brigham Young College from 1907 (the closing year is lost in the scan) and that he taught school at Arbon for two years, without saying when or where.
In September 1910 a front-page Press report on the settling of the valley put the matter in four words: "Another school is needed."
The vote of June 1911
Nine months later the Press carried this item among its local news:
The people of the lower part of Arbon valley will vote on a consolidation of school districts today and also upon the issuing of bonds to erect a four room school building. If both propositions carry the building will be erected on Tom Evan's place.
Bannock Creek rises at the head of the valley and runs north toward the Fort Hall Reservation, so the "lower part" probably meant its northern, downstream end; in 1917 Mrs. Logan called the Pauline settlement "the lower end of the Bannock valley." Tom Evans' farm lay toward that end, on the Arbon floor north of the Valley View school. He was almost certainly T. B. Evans of the Evans family: the Press called T. B. Evans "Tom" in 1914, and in 1917 he was named as the giver of the Central school's land. No report of how the vote came out has been found.
Three months later a legal notice headed "NOTICE OF BOND ELECTION IN ARBON SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 46" called the district's voters to "the South End School House" on September 30, 1911. They were to decide whether the trustees could issue bonds at no more than 6 percent interest, to be paid off a tenth at a time beginning ten years after issue. The scan has lost both the amount and the purpose, and the notice does not say where the south end schoolhouse stood. The clerk of the trustees signed it, printed as O. S. Butler. He was probably G. S. (George) Butler, at whose home the valley's first Protestant Sunday school had been organized that April. The notice does not say whether this was the newly joined district borrowing for its new school, and the result of this election has not been found either.
A schoolhouse goes up
On August 22, 1912, a front-page local item reported that "Contractor Hooker, who is building a school house in Arbon valley, spent Sunday at home with his family." He was probably H. E. Hooker, who had advertised in the Press as a contractor and builder at American Falls. The item does not name the school. It may have been the Central school, but Crystal's District 14 also built a schoolhouse in 1912, its Crystal Central School.
By the middle of 1913 the Central school was standing. Mrs. E. A. Logan's history of the valley, printed in the Press in 1917, says the Protestant Sunday school met in members' homes for two years, until the Central school was completed, and a Congregational church was organized there on July 13, 1913. That September the meeting to organize the valley's telephone company was called for "the Central school building, in Arbon." On Christmas Eve 1913 the Christmas tree and program were held there, with presents, candy, nuts and oranges for 125 children. In the spring of 1914 the Arbon correspondent wrote: "The weekly public dances are held every Friday night in the public hall of the Central school building."
Mrs. Logan described the building. "A graded school was built in the center of the district, known as Central school," she wrote, with two rooms and a large basement used for community purposes. She also recorded that "T. B. Evans, one of our most public-spirited citizens, gave the land for the Central school building." So the school stood on Evans land, as the 1911 plan had proposed, though with two rooms rather than four. No paper found says why. A passage of her history, jumbled in the scan, appears to say that H. Perry Howell, who had opened Pauline's first school in 1911, also taught at the Central school when it was first completed.
A new county and new numbers
Power County was created on January 30, 1913, and its line left the valley's south end in Oneida County. That April the new county's commissioners recorded that School District No. 46, because of the creation of Power County, was reorganized to take in the part that lay in the new county. The minutes, printed in May, are badly damaged in the scan.
In late July the commissioners numbered and named every school district in the county. Their list includes Valley View, Bannock Center, Meadow and Crystal, but the numbers cannot be read. By July 1916 the polling place for the Arbon precinct was the "Central school house, district No. 12," with Pauline in District 13 and Crystal in District 14. In 1917 Mrs. Logan placed the Valley View school about three miles south of the Central school, near E. Davis' store. The Arbon column of 1914 also mentions a "South End school," whose teacher, Mr. Walker, was planning a literary society.
On this site: the Arbon area history, which tells of Valley View and the old log building; the Evans family; the first school at Summit, in the part of the valley left in Oneida County; and the schools of Arbon Valley.
Sources
- American Falls Press, August 31, 1907, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 21, 1908, page 1
- American Falls Press, September 10, 1910, page 1
- American Falls Press, October 15, 1910, page 7
- American Falls Press, June 29, 1911, page 2
- American Falls Press, September 28, 1911, page 8
- American Falls Press, August 22, 1912, page 1
- American Falls Press, May 22, 1913, page 2
- American Falls Press, August 21, 1913, page 5
- American Falls Press, September 4, 1913, page 1
- American Falls Press, January 8, 1914, page 8
- American Falls Press, April 2, 1914, page 11
- American Falls Press, July 20, 1916, page 8
- American Falls Press, March 29, 1917, page 7
- Box Elder News Journal, September 8, 1938, page 4