The Kings of North Logan and their Arbon dry farm, 1913–1932

For about twenty years, from 1913 into the 1930s, the King family of North Logan, Utah, spent their winters in Cache Valley and their summers on a dry farm at Arbon. The town columns of the Logan papers noted their comings and goings. In 1931 and 1932 the Cache American passed on what Jack King told it about his crops, and the last of those summers ended in August 1932 with the death of his wife, Ruby.

"Delighted with the country"

North Logan lies just north of Logan, in Cache Valley, Utah. Arbon had been in Oneida County, Idaho, until early 1913, when it became part of the new Power County. On June 5, 1913, the Logan Journal reported:

Mr. Andrew King returned home on Wednesday from Arbon, Idaho. His son John is there dry farming. Mr. King is delighted with the country there.

John, usually called Jack, had married Ruby Nelson of North Logan in 1911. In March 1914 the Logan Journal reported that "Mrs. Johnnie King" had left for Arbon to spend the summer. Andrew King, home from another visit that month, was again "delighted with that country," the Logan Republican said.

An Idaho paper noticed them too. In July 1915 the American Falls Press reported that Mr. and Mrs. Andrew King and Jack King were going to Logan for the wedding of Mrs. Andrew King's niece. In August its South Arbon column said that Andrew's son LaVere, of Logan, had come to spend the summer with his parents.

The pattern held. In May 1917 "Mrs. Ruby King and children" left for Arbon on a Tuesday to spend the summer. In 1921 the North Logan column called the couple "Mr. and Mrs. John King of Arbon, Idaho." In May 1923 Mr. and Mrs. John King and family left for their ranch at Arbon, "where they will spend the summer." Jack's brother LaVere took his own family to a farm at Arbon in 1927. Their sister, Mrs. Laurence Batt, was remembered at her death in 1963 as having farmed in Arbon Valley in the summers.

A dry-farm year

By the late 1920s the columns trace the whole round of a season. In May 1927 Jack King and his son Andrew left for "their ranch at Arbon," and in August 1929 the family went out "for fall harvesting." On April 15, 1930, the Logan Journal reported that Jack had gone to his ranch and would be away all summer "looking after his crops and getting his summer fallowing done." Summer fallowing meant leaving a field unplanted for a season so that it stored a year's moisture, the practice that made dry farming pay in the valley. That August the family went out again to Arbon, "where they are harvesting their grain."

On August 3, 1931, the Logan Herald Journal reported that the family had left for the ranch to spend the summer months. On November 3, 1931, the Cache American reported Jack King, dry farmer, home for the winter. The item names no hometown, but he was probably the same man, since the paper's items of the next spring name Jack King of North Logan going out to Arbon. He had spent the summer at Arbon, "plowed 400 acres" and sown it to fall grain, planted in autumn for the 1932 harvest. The year had brought only "a small crop owing to the dryness," he said, and he was looking for a bumper crop the next year.

The site's Stories tell of the valley's dry years: the drought of 1919, and the drought and debt that emptied Crystal and Buist, where most of the Crystal ward left the valley after mid-1931.

The summer of 1932

In early May 1932 the Cache American reported that Jack King of North Logan had gone to Arbon for the summer, to look after his wheat and prepare land for fall planting. The number of bushels he hoped for is unreadable in the digitized page. Later that month "Jack King of Arbon" was in Logan to get "some extras" for his tractor, and he said the grain in his section promised "a very satisfactory crop." On June 7 the paper reported that the wheat at Arbon looked good, with "a prospect of a fairly heavy yield," and that Mr. King "carries a broad smile" as he told of forecasts of a better wheat price that fall.

The family was living on the farm that summer. On Friday, August 12, Ruby King became very sick. A doctor was called and told Jack to have her taken at once to the hospital at Malad, Idaho, south of the valley. She died at Malad at 8:30 on Sunday night, August 14, 1932. She was 42 and had been ill only a couple of days, the Cache American said. Born on May 19, 1890, she was a daughter of Carl M. and Annie L. Nelson of North Logan. She left six children: Andrew LaMar, Violet, Jack Junior, Maurine, Elaine and DeVola.

Her body was taken to her parents' home in North Logan. Her funeral was held in the North Logan ward chapel on Wednesday, August 17, and among the speakers was Bishop James Benson of Arbon, Idaho. She was buried in the Logan city cemetery, and Andrew King dedicated the grave. Two weeks later a Logan Herald Journal ward column reported Andrew King and Miss Violet King "of Arbon" visiting in the ward. They were probably Ruby's two eldest children. The papers read for this post do not say how the 1932 harvest turned out.

Which Jack King

The Jack King of these reports was Ruby's husband, John King, not their son Jack Junior. The Cache American called her the wife of Jack King of North Logan, and the Logan Herald Journal called her husband John King. His own obituary in 1984 gives his name as John "Jack" Jacobs King, born in North Logan on May 18, 1891. It says he married Ruby Nelson in the Logan LDS Temple in 1911 and homesteaded at Arbon, and that he later worked in and managed stores in Preston, Idaho. He died on October 27, 1984, at 93. That obituary dates Ruby's death to 1937, but the reports of 1932 were written at the time.

The son farmed at Arbon too: a 1994 anniversary notice says Jack Jr. and his wife, Fawn, farmed at Arbon before buying a farm near Weston, Idaho. The year printed in the digitized notice, 1930, cannot be right, since the couple were marking fifty years of marriage in 1994.

On this site: the Arbon area history, which tells of the early settlers who came from Samaria and Cache Valley.