Grandpa Arbon dies: the man the valley was named for, 1921

On Tuesday morning, March 22, 1921, George Arbon died at the home of his son Joseph N. Arbon in Malad City, Idaho. He was 81. On April 1 the American Falls Press, the Power County paper, carried a front-page obituary of "Grandpa" Arbon, "after whom the Arbon valley is named," with the story of his life continued on page 8.

Malad, over the mountains southeast of the valley, is in Oneida County, as Arbon was until Power County was formed in 1913.

At Malad

By 1920 George Arbon was living in Malad, while Joe farmed his old squatter's claim at Arbon. His 80th birthday party at Joe's Malad home in January 1920 drew neighbors and relatives, "forty-five in all," the obituary said, and at Christmas 1920 the Arbon column found Joe at Malad with his wife, his children and his father, "Grandpa Arbon."

On Thursday, March 17, 1921, he had a paralytic stroke. When word reached the valley the next day, his daughters Mrs. Jerry Baker and Mrs. E. H. Davis and his son Joe "left immediately for their father's bedside," and they were with him when he died. The body was to be taken to Willard, Utah, and buried beside his wife, who had died in October 1886.

The life story

According to the life story, George Arbon, the son of John and Rebecca Dennis Arbon, was born on January 5, 1840, at Graveley (printed "Gravely") in Cambridgeshire, England; the family history on this site has him christened at Graveley, Huntingdonshire. He left England in 1862, spent forty days at sea, and went on from New York to Florence, Nebraska, where he waited six weeks for teams from Utah to take the emigrants on. He reached Salt Lake City in September 1862 and that autumn went to Willard, Utah. There, in July 1865, he married Sarah Nichols. They had seven children, six girls and a boy.

The paper then told of failure after failure. At Willard grasshoppers destroyed his crops seven years running, and he recalled working five months for twenty-five bushels of wheat, when wheat was bringing five dollars a bushel, to feed his family. He moved to Malad and rented ground, and a "great army of black crickets" came down from the west hills; he harvested fourteen bushels. At Snowville, Utah, he started a farm of his own, and "the Jackrabbits found his growing crops and harvested what he had sown."

The struggle was kept up for fourteen years with similar experiences always hoping that the next season would bring success. He had to engage in freighting and team work to earn a living for his family.

At Almo, in Cassia County, Idaho, the soil was "dry and forbidding." After three years he came to Samaria, near Malad, and rented John Thorne's farm at what was by 1921 called Pleasantview. While he was there, the paper said, his attention "was called to the Bannock Valley," the valley's old name.

Knox Canyon water and a name

S. D. Davis "and another party," the obituary said, had found a stream in the west hills, in what was by then Knox Canyon, that sank before it reached the valley. The plan was to take it out of its old channel and carry it in a ditch along the hillside to the farms below. Davis was probably the Samuel Davis who, other accounts say, found the Knox Canyon water with D. J. Bowen in June 1892 (see the first irrigation ditch).

Joe Arbon became interested in the project and went to work with a will. Success came to them, the water came to their fields and soon they had smiling fields of grain and alfalfa for hay followed by cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, and today the name of Arbon in Bannock Valley stands for success.

Then came the name:

Others soon joined them until a little community was formed and as Mr. George Arbon was the oldest one in the company they decided to name the settlement "Arbon" in honor of George Arbon, and finally a post office by the same name, so that the name of George Arbon will be perpetuated down the corridor of time ...

The writer closed by saying he had "won his way through life by sheer persistence and hard work" and had been "always a faithful member of the L. D. S. church."

After the funeral

The scanned list of survivors is partly unreadable. It names Mrs. Maggie King of Canada, Mrs. Emma Payne and Mrs. Eva Walsh of Pocatello, and Mrs. Mayme Baker, who was Mrs. Jerry Baker. Emma was probably Emily, the eldest daughter, and Eva Walsh probably the Eva Arbon who had married Ezra Taft Andersen in 1904. Mrs. E. H. Davis was Esther, wife of Edward H. Davis.

Maggie King had come from Canada to Malad for the funeral. Afterwards, the April 8 Arbon column said, she went out to the valley with Joe's wife, who was returning to the farm after the winter in Malad, and visited her sisters there before going home.

Where the accounts differ

Much of this will be familiar from the George Dennis Arbon family history on this site. The later family sketches it quotes, among them the one in the 1982 book Bannock Valley, follow this obituary closely, in places word for word, down to "all but one girl of whom are living." The 1921 Press is the earliest printed version of that account found so far.

The obituary has him leaving England on the 17th of a month the scan garbles, which does not agree with the family history; that has his ship, the John Boyd, sailing from Liverpool on April 23, 1862. Its order of moves is simpler than the records, which place the family near Snowville in 1880, at Almo in 1883 and near Snowville again in 1891. It gives no year for his coming to the valley; other accounts range from 1892 to 1895.

The naming is told three ways. The obituary names the settlement first and the post office "finally." Mrs. E. A. Logan wrote in the Press in January 1920 that the town had borne his name "since 1895," and a 1917 Press profile of D. J. Bowen put the post office first and the valley's name after it. The post office named Arbon opened in 1898 (see the first post office).

On this site: Joseph Nicholas Arbon, the first to stay through a valley winter, and the Arbon area history.