From Yellville, Arkansas, to Buist: Mathew and Louise Bird

On Christmas Day 1921, at Yellville, Arkansas, Mathew Bird, a homesteader from Buist at the south end of Arbon Valley, married Louise Perry. Four years earlier, as a Latter-day Saint missionary, he had baptized her when she was fifteen. He brought her home to Buist, where they raised nine children, and in the 1930s her brother, married to a woman from Buist, came to farm in the valley too.

Buist lies in the part of the valley that stayed in Oneida County when Power County was formed in 1913. It was settled largely by families from Mendon, in Cache Valley, Utah, who filed their homesteads together in 1909. Only two short items found so far in the papers of the time clearly mention Mathew Bird before his marriage. The rest of the story comes from family notices printed decades later, chiefly Louise's obituary of 2000, and from the Utah social columns that followed Cache Valley families to their Idaho farms. The papers spelled his name both Mathew and Matthew; Louise's obituary calls him Matt.

A ranch rented for a mission

Mathew Fifield Bird grew up in Mendon, a son of Lewis R. Bird, and took up a homestead at Buist, where his brother Henry also settled. On September 9, 1915, in a column that also reported threshing "in full blast," the South Arbon correspondent of the American Falls Press wrote:

Mr. Albert Bird has rented his brother Matthew's ranch for next year. Matthew is going east on a mission.

The column did not say where. Louise's obituary, written decades later, suggests that his work took him to Marion County, in northern Arkansas, whose county seat is Yellville; no notice found clearly names his mission.

Elder Bird and the Perry family

Louise Young Perry was born at Yellville on September 29, 1902, a daughter of George Henry and Minnie Belle Young Perry. According to her obituary, elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as its missionaries are called, reached her family in Marion County, and the family joined the church. She was fifteen when Elder Matthew F. Bird baptized her, on December 2, 1917. Before her marriage she finished high school, taught school and spent a year at a normal school, as teacher-training colleges were then called.

By 1920 Mathew was back on his place. The Arbon column of the Press noted on December 3, 1920:

Mr. Mathew Bird of Sheep Creek was a visitor in Arbon last week.

Sheep Creek meant the Buist end of the valley: the first ranch there had stood at the mouth of Sheep Creek Canyon.

No paper of the time found so far reports what came next. Louise's obituary says that she married Matthew Fifield Bird at Yellville on December 25, 1921, and that the marriage was solemnized in the Logan Temple, in Cache Valley, on March 1, 1922; his own obituary of 1964 agrees. Then, in the obituary's words, "Matt took Louise to his homestead in Buist, Idaho." She was nineteen. How the two kept in touch over the four years between the baptism and the wedding is not recorded.

At Buist

After that the Birds appear mostly in the Mendon columns of Logan papers. In June 1928 Mr. and Mrs. Mathew Bird and family, of Arbon, Idaho, apparently visited his parents, the Lewis R. Birds, and in October 1930 Mathew spent a Monday with them. In July 1932 Mendon relatives went up to visit the Mathew and Henry Birds at Buist, and in June 1933 the Cache American called them the Mathew Birds "of Holbrook," a community a few miles southwest of Buist.

In 1926 Louise became Buist's postmaster, one of the last before the office closed in 1936; the site's post office story tells its history. Those were the years when drought and the farm depression brought Buist down to fourteen families by 1930, and the Birds were among those who stayed. Mathew's obituary credits him with seventeen years on the high council of the Curlew Stake, the group of congregations to which the Buist ward belonged, and many years in the Mountain View Ward, probably the Buist congregation the site calls the Mount View Ward.

A brother follows

In August 1931 the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported that Miss Norma Smith of Buist and George H. Perry Jr. of Yellville, Arkansas, had been married in the Logan Temple, and that after a honeymoon trip through Yellowstone Park they would make their home in Arkansas. George was Louise's brother, as her obituary confirms.

When the couple's fiftieth anniversary was announced in 1981, the Logan Herald Journal said that Norma, born in Mendon to Robert Smith and Margaret Ella Willie, had grown up on her parents' dry farm in Idaho, and had been a schoolteacher for six years and a missionary in Texas and Louisiana before she married. Her mother was probably the widow Margaret E. Smith who filed among Buist's founding homesteaders in 1909. None of the notices says how she and George met.

The Perrys spent four years in Arkansas, and two of their children were born there; then they came to Arbon to dry farm. In 1943 they moved to Logan for the children's schooling, yet in 1981 the notice could still say that "George and his sons still own and operate their farm in Arbon."

Later years

The Birds had moved to Logan in 1942, but they kept their farm. Their son David, born in 1936, grew up mostly on the farm, by his obituary's account, though he finished school at Logan High. In July 1960 a Logan firm advertising a grain-saver for combines working on hillsides printed testimonials from its customers; among them were George H. Perry and David L. Bird, both of Arbon.

Mathew Bird died in Logan on November 1, 1964, at 78. His obituary said he had farmed in Arbon Valley until he retired, and it listed David among his survivors as living at Buist. David settled in the valley for good in 1973 and served ten years as president of the Arbon Valley branch of the church before his death in 1997.

Louise took up family history. By 1982 she had served twenty years as a missionary at the Cache genealogical library, and in 1979 she had served a mission in Jackson, Mississippi. She died at Orem on March 5, 2000, at 97, and was buried in Logan.

On this site: the Buist area history and the post office at Buist, which Louise Bird kept.