Peter M. Larsen: summers at Summit, winters in Mendon

Peter M. Larsen was a Mendon schoolteacher who kept a ranch at the Summit end of Arbon Valley, near the mouth of Bull Canyon. From 1915 to the 1950s the papers on both sides of the state line followed him and his family between Cache Valley in northern Utah and the ranch in Idaho. Arbon was in Oneida County until 1913 and in Power County after.

He was born in Mendon on December 2, 1864, a son of Magnus and Mary Larsen, early Cache Valley pioneers whose family had come from Denmark. His sister Sophia was the mother of the Arbon Andersens. In 1893 he married Ann Longstroth of Mendon. They had five children: Guy, Miles, Theo, May and Vera.

1915: "from Cache Valley"

The first reports come from the South Arbon column of the American Falls Press in 1915. In early June it reported that Guy Larsen's saddle horse had stepped in a badger hole and broken its leg. In early September, with harvest under way and crews short of men, the column reported that "Peter Larsen and son Miles, have arrived from Cache Valley to harvest their grain," and to look after their cattle. In early October the column reported that Miles was quite sick and had to be taken home to Mendon. Two weeks later the column added:

Peter Larson was called to Mendon a few days ago on account of the serious illness of his daughter Mae.

That November the same column called Guy "Mr. Guy Larsen of Bull Canyon."

Mae was probably the May Larsen of Mendon, "a daughter of Peter Larsen," who had become a deputy in the county clerk's office at Logan in 1912. In 1929, as Mrs. Mae Larsen Pedersen, she was a county deputy clerk.

The Mendon column

From 1929 the Cache Valley papers kept count of the Larsens' seasons. On October 1, 1929, the Logan Journal reported that Peter M. Larsen and his wife, of Arbon, were visiting their daughter Mae in Logan, and that he was moving his family to Mendon for the winter. In late September 1930 Mr. and Mrs. Peter Larsen went back to their Arbon ranch, and by late October they were home in Mendon again.

The 1930s columns follow the same round. In November 1931 the couple came back from the ranch to spend the winter in Mendon, and Miles and his wife came down from Arbon to spend several days with them. In October 1934 they were home for the winter after a summer on the ranch. On April 23, 1935, the Cache American reported that they had left on Tuesday for their ranch at Arbon, to spend the summer there.

By then Guy and Miles were married men living at Arbon. The Mendon column called them "of Arbon" when their mother was very ill with heart trouble in April 1933 and her children were called to her bedside. In January 1934 Guy's birds won first and second cockerel at the livestock show in Ogden. The brothers came down for family occasions: their aunt Sophia Andersen's funeral in May 1939, and a dinner that December at their sister May's home in Logan for their father's 75th birthday.

Looking back

When Peter Larsen turned 80 in December 1944, the North Cache News reported that he had taught school for 23 years and still drove his own car. He hoped to buy a new car after the war and drive to Alaska on the new highway through Canada. The paper said that in 1915 he had been "one of the first homesteaders in Arbon Valley," and that the buildings he put up there were still in use. Guy and Miles were still at Arbon, and one of his twelve grandchildren was in the armed forces in France.

At 87, in December 1951, the Logan Herald Journal added more. He had taught at Petersboro and Mendon, served two terms on the Mendon city council and also as mayor, and seen the town get its water system, electric lights and the electric railway. His wife had "died some years ago." He had homesteaded at Arbon and lived there "most of the time since leaving the school room in 1912." By then Guy and Miles were both living at Malad.

When did the Larsens come?

The accounts do not agree. The site's Summit history credits a Peter Larsen with water claims there in 1893–94. Land records show that a Peter Larsen of Mendon made one of the first homestead entries at the Summit end on July 2, 1901, and received his patent in 1907; this was probably the same man. Guy's obituary in 1961 said the family moved to Arbon when he was nine, about 1905. The 1951 article dates his years at Arbon from 1912, when he left teaching. The 1944 notice put his homesteading in 1915 and called him one of the first in the valley, though the land records show entries at the Summit end from 1901. What the papers show plainly is a family with one foot in Mendon and the other at Summit for more than thirty years.

Guy Larsen died at Malad in 1961. His obituary remembered him as a justice of the peace, school trustee and fire warden at Arbon.

On this site: the Summit area history, the Firsts entries on Summit's first water claims and first homesteads, and the Larsen family album, which holds the 1907 homestead patent to Peter Larsen.