A minister's portrait of Bannock Valley in 1913

In the summer of 1913 the Rev. B. W. Rice, a Congregational minister, sent a hill of wheat and a report from Arbon to the Gem State Rural, which the American Falls Press later called "Idaho's farm paper." The Press passed his report along on August 7, 1913, under the heading "Wheat in Bannock Valley." It gives his view of the valley's wheat, land and people, and of the churches he was starting.

Rice wrote from "Arbon, Power county, Idaho." Power County had been created that January, and Arbon, until then in Oneida County, was now part of it.

A hill of wheat

The sample, probably of Odessa wheat (the name is garbled in the digitized text), had 168 heads. Rice said they shelled four heads and got an average of 40 grains, which, the paper said, "would make 6320 grains for the one the farmer put into the ground." As the digitized text reads them, the figures do not quite agree, since 168 heads at 40 grains make 6,720; one number may be misprinted or misread. Rice did not claim that a whole field would do as well:

"I don't represent," says Mr. Rice, "that a field will do this well, but I do think it will yield 100 bushels to the acre in this valley if planted two feet each way, and cultivated up to blossoming time." This too, is dry farming.

Dry farming meant raising grain without irrigation. Rice described Bannock Valley as a small one, about 40 miles south and a little east of Pocatello; his figures for its elevation and its wheat land are garbled in the digitized text. The land, he said, was "nearly all taken," and "final homestead proof is starting now." Final proof was the last step of homesteading: after living on and farming a claim for the years the law required, a settler proved up, with neighbors as witnesses, to receive title.

He expected the wheat to run 26 bushels that year and the oats and barley about 50. Deeded land, already owned outright, could be bought for $20 an acre, and there was good wood and fair timber not far away.

Others were hopeful too. In June, after a visit from Mr. Houk of Arbon, the Press reported, "Everything is lovely in the Bannock valley." In the issue that carried Rice's letter, Jewell Horton, justice of the peace at Arbon, called conditions "fine and dandy in his neck of the woods," and the paper expected Power County to harvest "over a million bushels of wheat." In October L. B. "Ren" Evans, whom the Press called "one of the real live boosters for Bannock valley," said the wheat then leaving the valley was to what would follow, once everyone began hauling, as Bannock Creek was to the Snake River.

The people of the valley

"In speaking of social conditions," Rice put the people of the locality at 123 Gentiles and 295 Mormons. Gentiles, in the usage of the time, meant anyone outside the Latter-day Saint church. The Gentiles, he said, were "energetic people" from the eastern states.

He was staying at the home of "a Mr. Nunnelley," probably W. A. Nunnelley, whose Kentucky family had taken up homesteads at the south end of the valley in 1909; their first winter there is told among the Stories. The paper's account of a piano at the Nunnelley home is too garbled in the digitized text to follow.

Two churches

Protestant work in the valley had begun in April 1911 with a Sunday school in G. S. Butler's home, as told in the first Protestant Sunday school and church. In March 1913 Superintendent Ludwig Thomsen reported in The American Missionary, a Congregational missions magazine, that he had organized another Sunday school, at the south end:

The Highland Sunday-school in Arbon Valley starts out hopefully. This valley is one of the fertile sections of Southeastern Idaho, the Mormon section of the state. It is seven or eight miles wide, and twenty-five miles long, between two ranges of mountains. It is thirty-five miles from a railroad. The population is about one-third Mormon and two-thirds non-Mormon. The Gentiles have come there within the last five or six years, and are fast developing the land.

A Sunday school in the north end, he wrote, had been meeting for a year and a half, about twelve miles from the new one. The south-end leader had been educated at an American Missionary Association school in Kentucky; Thomsen gave no name, and although the Nunnelleys came from Kentucky, no source says the leader was one of them.

The counts do not agree. Thomsen made the Latter-day Saints about a third of the people, Rice's figures make them about seven in ten, and Robert W. Sturges, the student pastor of 1915, later put them at "about sixty per cent." None said how the numbers were reached.

According to the valley history Mrs. E. A. Logan wrote for the Press in 1917, a Congregational church was organized at the Central school on July 13, 1913. Rice's report, printed in the Press less than four weeks later, described the work:

Mr. Rice is doing community church extension work, and is putting in two Congregational churches in that valley, which is the only religious work being done there, outside of the Latter Day Saints. He says that a pushing pastor and wife will be sent there soon, and that the people are laying aside sectarian differences and concentrating their denominational powers in the church union that has been formed.

By early 1914 the Highland Congregational church had a building, about twelve miles south of the Central school, on land given by Miss Mamie Nunnelley, and that term the school met in it. The Press announced that the Rev. Thomas Dent Fee, pastor at Eagle Butte, South Dakota, had been engaged for "the two new Congregational churches which were organized last July." He arrived on April 4, 1914, and preached his first sermon the next day, with a large attendance reported. How long he stayed, and whether a wife came with him, the papers found do not say.

In late May 1915 Sturges, of New York City, a student at Union Theological Seminary, came to serve the Congregational churches of Arbon valley for four months, preaching at Highland and at Arbon. The Summit area history says the community church there, built on an acre Mamie Nunnelley gave, was discontinued in the early 1920s.

On this site: the first congregations at Summit and the first school at Summit, built beside the Highland church in 1915, are among the Stories.