Arbon Valley's Sunday school children and Cora Sorensen, 1913–1946

Between 1913 and 1928 the Juvenile Instructor, the magazine of the Latter-day Saints' Deseret Sunday School Union in Salt Lake City, printed the names, and now and then the stories, of children from Arbon, Pauline and Buist. Over the same years Cora Sorensen, first at Mendon, Utah, and then at the Summit end of the valley, was teaching the youngest children in Sunday school, and in 1946 the Deseret News honored her for thirty-three years of it.

The magazine's children's department, the Children's Budget Box, was written by children (in the 1920s the magazine specified children under seventeen), who competed for book prizes; each piece had to be vouched for as original by a teacher, parent or guardian. Below the printed pieces and the puzzle answers came lists of winners and honorable mentions.

A baptism in the creek, 1913

In October 1913 the Budget Box printed a short story called "Ruth's Eighth Birthday," signed "Lyle Lusk, Age 11. Arbon, Idaho." In it a girl named Ruth is given a black and white kitten for her eighth birthday, the age at which Latter-day Saint children are baptized, and then asks her father for one thing more:

"Father, there is one thing I want done tomorrow, and that is, I want to be baptized."
"All right," said her father; "I will ask the bishop to baptize you."
The next morning Ruth was up early. And after dinner she and her little kitten went with her father and the bishop down to the creek. She was frightened at first, but after she came out of the water she was very happy.

It is a child's story, and it names no real place or person. Lyle was probably Annie Lysle Lusk, born in 1902, a daughter of John W. and Annie Lusk; their family history on this site lists her among their children. If so, her father had a hand in Sunday school himself: the American Falls Press recalled in 1917 that when the Latter-day Saints at Pauline organized one in 1910, John W. Lusk was an assistant to its superintendent.

In December the magazine named Lyle Lusk of Arbon among the winners of its September puzzle, a jumble of city names, remarking that its readers were "as clever in picking up pi as they are in eating pie." (Pi was the printers' word for jumbled type.)

Names on the lists, 1922 and 1928

One honorable-mention list in July 1922 included Elene Noble of Pauline, a daughter of John Noble, who built Pauline's first store, and Fanny Noble, its first postmaster. The same list included Verda Sorensen of Arbon, probably Cora Sorensen's eldest daughter: the 1920 census at the Summit end lists Ammon and Cora Sorensen with a daughter Verda, 9.

In March 1928 the list included Valerie Hardman of Buist, probably Cora's niece. When Cora's brother Gwen Hardman died in 1937, his obituary in the Logan Herald Journal named a daughter, Mrs. Valerie Burnett of Holbrook, and listed Mrs. A. A. Sorenson among his sisters.

Healed by Prayer, 1928

Another piece by a valley child came in September 1928, under the title "Healed by Prayer." Nine-year-old Geneva Wheatley of Pauline wrote that when her brother Carl was learning to walk he ate so much dirt that he grew pale and sickly. The doctor did not help, she wrote, so one day, after rocking him to sleep, their mother knelt by the bed and asked the Lord to heal him. Geneva went on:

And mama promised the Lord if He would bless her little boy and make him well and strong that she would let him go on a mission when he grew to be a man.
My little brother never ate any more dirt and has been healthy and strong ever since. He is seven years old and walks one and one-half miles to school with me every day.

Geneva and Carl were children of Robert and Elsie Wheatley, whom the census of April 1930 found at Pauline with Geneva, 10, Carl, 9, and a younger son, Myron, 5. When Geneva wrote, her father was the bishop of the Meadow Ward, the Latter-day Saint ward at Pauline. Andrew Jenson's Encyclopedic History of the Church (1941) says he led it from 1921 until the ward was disorganized in 1929.

Thirty-three years with the little ones

Cora Sorensen was a Hardman of Mendon, in Cache Valley, Utah. She married Ammon A. Sorensen at Logan in March 1910. The Sorensens and several of the Hardmans took up homesteads at the south end of Bannock Valley; in August 1913 the Mendon news in the Logan Republican listed Mr. and Mrs. Ammon Sorenson with Hardmans and others going out to their homesteads at Buist.

According to the Deseret News, her teaching began about that September in Mendon, with the Sunday school's kindergarten class, its youngest children. After two years she moved to Arbon and kept on teaching. The Logan paper bears this out: at Christmas 1915 it reported, "Ammon Sorensen and family of Arbon, Idaho, are visiting in Mendon."

The Sorensens' congregation at the south end had been organized as the Canyon Branch in 1913 and became the Summit Ward in 1915 (see the first congregations at Summit). Jenson's history names Ammon Sorensen its bishop from 1924 until May 18, 1930, when the ward was discontinued and its remaining members were sent to the Mount View and Arbon wards.

When the Summit Ward was dissolved, the 1946 article says, the family joined the Malad Second Ward, and in all but the winter months Cora drove the thirty-five miles from their ranch at Arbon to Malad every Sunday morning to teach the kindergarten class there. For most of her thirty-three years, the paper said, she had traveled anywhere from three to thirty-five miles each Sunday "to greet the smiling little ones who love her so dearly." She had never been late, and missed only when she was away from home or could not help it. She gave as her reason, the paper said, her love of little children and the joy of teaching them the gospel.

The two accounts differ on one point. The 1946 article places the end of the Summit Ward "eleven years" earlier, about 1935, while Jenson gives May 1930; the sources read for this post do not settle which is right, or whether the family's move to the Malad ward came later than the ward's end.

On this site: the histories of Summit, Buist and Pauline and West Fork.

Arbon Valley's Sunday school children and Cora Sorensen, 1913–1946

A baptism in the creek, 1913

Names on the lists, 1922 and 1928

Healed by Prayer, 1928

Thirty-three years with the little ones

Sources

Connected histories

Pauline and West Fork

Buist