Triplets for a young Buist couple, 1977–1978
On December 31, 1977, Arbon school-bus driver Denver Sweeten and his wife Lucinda, of Buist, became parents of triplets; a year later the Journal marked their first birthday.
News, observations, announcements, and remembrances from the original Arbon Valley community blog.
Community blog · 2010–2020 · original publication order · stories from the old papers added since 2026
On December 31, 1977, Arbon school-bus driver Denver Sweeten and his wife Lucinda, of Buist, became parents of triplets; a year later the Journal marked their first birthday.
In 1976 Jessie Hubbard told a Utah paper how weather ruled life on her family's Arbon Valley dry farm, where her husband David sometimes rode a horse six miles to reach his school bus.
Utah papers of 1976–1998 reported Arbon's missionaries, branch presidents and an Eagle Scout, and sometimes called the valley's Latter-day Saint branch a ward.
Utah want ads of 1976–1983 offered Arbon Valley recreation land at Knox Canyon, a cattle range, barnwood and big dry farms, and in 1983 a 320-acre farm offered by the government.
Grasshopper spraying in 1973, Mormon crickets moving through Bull Canyon in 1975, and crickets in the safflower in 1991: three summers of insect trouble in Arbon Valley.
Two daughters of the man Arbon was named for: Mayme Baker died in Pocatello in 1953, and Eva Andersen, the last of his seven children, in Los Angeles in 1973.
In 1973 the *Idaho State Journal* sent campers past Pauline and Arbon to Twin Springs on the Hudspeth Cutoff; other papers recall a 1969 trail marker and an 1857 camp in Bannock Valley.
Married at Arbon in 1913, in the earliest wedding yet found in the valley, Jack and Stella Price marked sixty years in 1973; the papers follow their West Fork years and a daughter's early death.
Joe Arbon, Arbon Valley's first bishop, and William Allard, the first valley man found in the Idaho Legislature, were born in 1875 and died in Pocatello in 1972 and 1973.
At 97, George Daniels Sr., Oneida County's oldest man and once a West Fork homesteader, recalled a horse drive, river fords, old injuries and calling square dances in Arbon Valley.
In March 1972 the Fort Hall tribes impounded more than 300 cattle on Bannock Creek that they said belonged to the Arbon rancher Sod Williams.
Ralph G. Butler, a son of Pauline homesteaders, kept a diary of the Pacific war until 1944 and was lost when his destroyer sank in a typhoon; in 1971 ISU historians edited it.
An Arimo barber retiring in 1971 recalled the years he and his brother Abe ran horses in Bannock Valley and on Dairy Creek, until the hard times after the First World War.
Joe Morse Evans, a son of the Arbon pioneers Ren and Anna Evans, worked in Pocatello's mills, farmed at Arbon from 1947 and died on September 12, 1971, at 72.
David Siewert, born in Russia to German parents, homesteaded at Crystal, stayed on through its emptying years, and died at Calgary, Canada, in June 1971 at 83.
Two Malad teachers retiring in 1971 recalled their early country schools, Buist among them: $70 a month for every grade and the janitor work, water carried from home, a horse that bit.
In 1970 Arbon-area residents talked with the Oneida School Board at Malad about changing a system that sent a bus into their area only twelve weeks a year.
In September 1970 an elderly Fort Hall sheepherder left a broken-down pickup near Bannock Peak and walked out on his own while searchers hunted for him by air, truck and horse.
Letters from the Swiss town of Arbon led Nelda Williams to write a history of Arbon Valley, which a Swiss newspaper had printed with photographs of her family by November 1969.
Nearing 84 in 1970, Martha Thyberg recalled early married washdays by a creek; the old papers add how her husband built their Arbon Valley cabin alone.
In the summer of 1969 Intermountain Gas Co. had a test well drilled on Donald Porter's farm near Arbon, but it went down 3,677 feet without a show of oil or gas.
When the state moved a planned freeway interchange away from Bannock Creek in 1969, Arbon Valley ranchers and their neighbors asked for it back, and in September they got it.
In 1969 a Pocatello paper profiled first-grade teacher Lettie Allard as she prepared to retire, and in one paragraph described her husband, the Arbon homesteader William Allard, then 93.
In April 1969 Marine Lt. Reese Andersen of Arimo and Arbon Valley died of an accidental gunshot near Quang Tri; the papers told of his life and his funeral at Arimo.
In 1969 Charles Connelly, about to turn 89, recalled thirteen years homesteading at Crystal: snow over the cabin, grain sledded to Arimo, and a blizzard that hid the way home.
After the Mac Orison and Charles Orison Jr. families lost their belongings in a fire in the fall of 1967, the valley planned a potluck and fiddlers' dance at Arbon for them.
Don Jenson came to Arbon Valley as a boy in 1909, farmed there all his life and served in two Arbon ward bishoprics; his 1968 obituary sums up the life.
In December 1967 a Snowville mother and her two boys, stuck in a drift in Arbon Valley, sheltered overnight in a house they reached on foot and rode home after the snowplow came through.
In November 1967 Kay Bailey of Arbon sang a Broadway medley to win the Idaho Farm Bureau's state senior talent find and a trip to the national convention in Chicago.
Early on October 3, 1967, two-year-old LaGrande Shay of an Arbon Valley family was struck and killed by a car on Highway 30 about three miles west of Pocatello.