Gwen and Lucille Hardman's Arbon ranch, 1913–1941

Gwen Dolan Hardman and Lucille Bird, both of Mendon in Cache Valley, Utah, were married on October 22, 1913, and went north to homestead a dry farm in Arbon Valley. For the next quarter century the Mendon news in the Logan papers followed the family between their Arbon ranch and their Cache Valley hometown.

A homestead toward Buist

Gwen was born at Mendon in 1893, a son of Joseph H. and Octavia Peirce Hardman. Lucille, born in 1896, was the tenth of the twelve children of Mormon and Emerine Bird of Mendon, and she was seventeen when they married. Later notices say only that the couple homesteaded a dry farm at Arbon. By the site's land research, Gwen's claim was 320 acres at the south end of Summit, the high, level dry-farm country between Arbon and Buist, patented in December 1918.

Relatives went back and forth. In August 1915 the South Arbon column of the American Falls Press reported a Miss Bird of Cache Valley visiting her sister, Mrs. Hardman, probably Lucille; the first name is garbled in the copy. In November 1917, when the Logan Journal listed Lucille's brother Cyril Bird among three Mendon young men who had just enlisted in the navy, it noted that Mr. and Mrs. G. Hardman of Arbon had come in to see him.

Sickness sent the family the other way. In July 1922 the Press reported from Arbon:

A. A. Sorenson went to Mendon, Utah, Saturday to take Mrs. Gwen Hardman and children, one being very ill with spotted fever and one with the mumps.

Gwen's obituary would later list a Mrs. A. A. Sorenson among his sisters. Spotted fever was in the valley that summer: the same column said that James Warner, also very ill with it, was improving. The paper does not name the children or say how they fared.

Into 1932 the Mendon columns still called them the Hardmans of Arbon. In August 1930 Cyril Bird and his family drove up to "spend a few days visiting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Gwen Hardman," and in July 1932 the C. P. Bird family of Mendon had been visiting them at Arbon. The Hardmans' youngest child, Eldon Dean, was born at Malad on July 4, 1932.

Winters in Mendon

That fall the papers first report a move to town. On October 1, 1932, the Logan Herald Journal reported that the Gwen Hardmans of Arbon had moved into Mendon. Lucille's obituary, many years later, explained the arrangement: the family came back to Mendon each fall so the children could go to school, and went back to the farm in Idaho each spring.

Mendon friends came north in the summer. The Cache American of August 4, 1933, reported that six Mendon couples, the Jesse Walkers, Earl Hancocks, Andrew Lamonts, Arthur Kidmans, George Hiibners and Jesse Bakers, had driven to Buist for a dance. Afterward they went to the Gwen Hardman home, where a midnight luncheon was served, and spent the rest of the night there. The next day they visited relatives and friends before going home. Mrs. Lamont was Gwen's sister.

In town the family turned up often in the Mendon news. In April 1934 Lois was chosen queen of Mendon's May Day celebration, and the same column reported the family just back from a week at their ranch. In January 1935 Valerie returned to Brigham Young University at Provo after the holidays, and that June Lucille accompanied Russell and John Lamont in a duet at a ward program. A few days later the Cache American reported that the family had moved "to their ranch at Arbon, Idaho for the summer."

The older children were starting their own homes. In September 1935 Russell, 21, of Mendon (his surname appears as "Hardson" in the digitized list) took out a marriage license at Ogden with Sylvia Bailey, 19, of Arbon, probably the Sylvia born in 1916 to Lorenzo and Chloa Bailey. On December 3, 1936, Valerie married Carl Burnett in the Salt Lake Temple.

1937 and after

Gwen Hardman died at his home on Saturday evening, May 1, 1937, after an illness of three months. He was 43. The Herald Journal carried his obituary on its front page that Monday, and his funeral was set for the Mendon ward chapel. He left Lucille; their sons Russell and Eldon; three daughters, among them Valerie Burnett of Holbrook, Idaho; and brothers and sisters including Floyd Hardman of Mendon, Pierce Hardman, Mrs. Andrew Lamont and Mrs. A. A. Sorenson.

Lucille kept up the summers at the ranch. In June 1938 a group of girls surprised Donna Hardman, probably LaDonna, with a party before the family moved to their ranch in Arbon. Russell and Sylvia summered on "their ranch in Arbon" as well. In December 1938 they and their daughter came back from the ranch to spend the winter in Mendon, and in May 1939 they moved out again for the summer. In June 1939 Lucille and her family went to the ranch as well. In mid-September she came back to Mendon for the winter with Lois, LaDonna and Dean, as the papers called Eldon, and the same column reported that Russell, Sylvia and the baby had driven in from the ranch for dinner with her. Early in October Gwen's brother Pierce, moving his own family from Arbon to North Logan, lost a truckload of household goods to fire on the road.

In April 1940 Russell's family moved back to the ranch, and Lucille went up with Lois, LaDonna and Dean to visit them. In September Russell, Sylvia and their daughter returned to Mendon after the summer on their ranch. On June 12, 1941, Lucille married R. Truman Hillyard in the Logan Temple and moved to Smithfield.

Looking back

The papers do not say when the family gave up the Arbon land. Dean, who was nine in 1941, worked on "the family farm in Arbon Valley" in the summers while he was growing up, his obituary said in 1997, so the family probably still farmed there into the 1940s. Russell later lived at Pocatello. Lucille Hillyard died at Logan on October 10, 1993, at 97. Her obituary remembered the homestead in Arbon and the moves between farm and town each spring and fall, and said she had always called Mendon her hometown.

On this site: Summit; Buist, whose ward met only from April to October because most families wintered in town; Lorenzo H. Bailey; and the drought and debt that emptied Crystal and Buist in the same years.

Gwen and Lucille Hardman's Arbon ranch, 1913–1941

A homestead toward Buist

Winters in Mendon

1937 and after

Looking back

Sources

Connected histories

Buist