Elmira and Delone Smith, two homestead daughters at Summit

In 1915 the American Falls Press printed a regular column of news from South Arbon, the homesteads around Highland at the high south end of Arbon Valley, the area known as Summit. Among the threshing crews, ball games and visits, two names keep turning up: the Misses Elmira and Delone Smith. Their obituaries, written some seventy years later, give the homestead years a phrase each. The old columns show a little more.

A Logan family at Summit

The sisters were born in North Logan, Utah: Emma Elmira on October 19, 1898, and Chloe DeLone, who went by Delone, on June 8, 1901. Their parents were Edward Girdlestone Smith and Chloe Ann Beirdneau Smith. In 1909, when the whole valley was still part of Oneida County, Edward filed on a Summit homestead a few weeks after his brother-in-law Joseph C. Jenson, on a quarter that met the Jensons' at one corner, and the census of May 1910 found the two families living next door to each other. The Jenson family history tells their side. Edward proved up and received his patent, the government's deed to the land, in May 1916.

Delone's obituary says only that the family moved to Arbon Valley when she was a young girl, "where they homesteaded." Elmira's says she lived in Arbon Valley, "where she received her early education."

The Smiths were Latter-day Saints. The Saints at the south end had organized a branch in 1913 that met in private homes, and on Sunday, May 23, 1915, its services were held at the residence of "Mr. E. G. Smith," as the South Arbon column put it.

The summer of 1915

That same column, of June 3, 1915, carried Elmira's news and, further down, the district's plans for a school:

Thelma Nunnelley and Elmira Smith just received the good news that they had passed the eighth grade examination in this district.
The people of this district have bonded for $2,500 and expect to have a new school house in the center of the district and run two school wagons this fall. They also expect to hire two teachers.

Elmira was sixteen. The new building went up that fall as Highland School, the first schoolhouse on record at Summit. Two weeks after the examination news, the column reported that Guy Benson had treated "his school pupils" to a picnic on June 11 at the Frank ranch in the mountains. Benson, a young Logan man who taught in the valley until he moved to Malad in 1916, had married the girls' older sister, Hazel, in January 1914, and in September the paper found him at work on the new school building.

Through the summer the column followed the sisters about the neighborhood. Early in July it reported that Delone had gone to Logan to visit relatives. The column of September 2 named them twice:

Mrs. H. E. Chapman, Mrs. Herman Noth, Misses Elmira and Delone Smith and Miss Amy Johnson were visitors at the Nunnelley home Friday.
Misses Ella and LaNetta Ferguson have been the guests of Misses Elmira and Delone Smith.

The Nunnelleys, a Kentucky sawmill family, had moved onto their Summit homesteads in 1909, the year Edward Smith filed on his, and their first winter is told among the Stories. Later in September Edward Smith and Elmira left for a two weeks' visit to Logan.

The next June the Arbon column reported: "E. G. Smith and W. A. Nunnley came in today with a new Studebaker car each. They are the proudest men in Arbon." This was probably the girls' father, since W. A. Nunnelley was his neighbor at Summit.

Two roads from Summit

The South Arbon column of 1915 also mentions Guy Larsen, son of Peter M. Larsen of Mendon, very probably the Peter Larsen who was one of the first homesteaders at Summit. His obituary says the family moved to Arbon when he was nine, about 1905, but the 1915 columns still had the Larsens coming and going from Cache Valley. That spring Guy's saddle horse stepped in a badger hole and broke its leg. Early in July the column reported that he had gone home to Utah after spending the spring in the valley, and on September 2 that Peter Larsen and his son Miles had come from Cache Valley to harvest their grain and look after their cattle. By November the paper called Guy "Mr. Guy Larsen of Bull Canyon," the canyon at Summit where the Nunnelleys ran a sawmill. In August 1918, at Malad, Delone married him. She was seventeen.

They stayed. Her obituary says they farmed and ranched in Arbon Valley for many years, and his says he served Arbon as justice of the peace, school trustee and fire warden. Her parents later went back to Logan, where Edward G. Smith died on December 28, 1929, at fifty-nine. The Logan Journal listed his five children, among them Mrs. J. Guy Benson of Malad, Mrs. Brown of Logan and "Mrs. Guy Larsen, Arbon, Idaho." Ten years later, when Guy's father turned seventy-five, the Logan paper named Guy and Delone among the guests from Arbon. In later years they lived at Malad, where Guy died at his home on July 1, 1961. Delone stayed on in Malad, active in the Relief Society and the Malad Valley Square Dance Club, and died on November 9, 1982, at eighty-one.

Elmira's road led back to Utah. Her obituary says she graduated from Brigham Young College in Logan. She married Merl William Brown in Logan on February 22, 1922; he died in 1933. She lived in Provo, Ogden and Logan, served as president of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Auxiliary in Logan, belonged to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers and worked for many years in the Logan Temple. When Delone died, Elmira was named among her survivors. She died in Logan on December 17, 1986, at eighty-eight.

Neither obituary names Summit, but the 1915 columns show both girls there: an eighth-grade examination passed, a schoolhouse being planned, visits with the neighbors and trips back to Logan.

On this site: the history of Summit, the Jenson family next door, Highland School and the first congregations at Summit.