News, remembrances, and stories of Arbon Valley from two sources: the newspapers that reported the valley from the 1890s on, and the ArbonValley.com community blog of 2010–2020.
Routine notices (meeting notices, reminders and classifieds) are left out of this list; find them under Notices.
From 1929 to 1934 Hyrum Kay of Pocatello kept writing the Tribune about a lone rock in Arbon Valley that showed the face of the Sphinx at sunset, a landmark he said valley settlers knew as the Old Man of the Valley.
In June 1899 men from Surveyor Sonnenkalb's camp cornered a silver-tip blamed for hundreds of dead sheep in an aspen thicket at the head of Rattlesnake Creek and killed it with a borrowed gun and a six-shooter.
When snow closed the reservation road in the winter of 1928–29, carrier Jerry B. Hatch carried the Arbon mail on his back, and a Crystal woman rode the last miles home beside it on a mail horse.
Rosa Bishoff, a Swiss immigrant of 1893 who raised her family at Pauline, died in Pocatello on December 6, 1928, at 59.
In 1928 J. R. Munn recalled Tom Sparks's cattle on the Arbon and Crystal range, the Fleming sheep that crowded them, and the sheepman found shot near Sunbeam creek, a killing other papers place in 1894.
Brought into Pocatello at 3:30 on New Year's morning 1928 with a ruptured appendix, twelve-year-old Earl Lewis of Pauline lived eighteen more days.
In January 1928 two of Power County's oldest residents were asked to name the nameless mountains between Arbon and Rockland valleys, and they chose Rock Creek range.
Elk calves the state turned loose near Crystal grew into a herd of hundreds that wrecked fences and haystacks, until a Crystal rancher complained in 1927 and a cowboy was hired the next winter to keep them off the farms.
In spring 1927 crews hauled poles through Arbon Valley mud for a power line from American Falls to Utah, and the telephone men braced for what it would do to their wires.
In the dry summer of 1926 Arbon Valley harvested one of the biggest wheat crops in its memory, early, and its farmers bought big new trucks to haul it to the railroad at Schiller.
In 1926 the Gem State well at Arbon drew crowds, blew gas through its plug, was said to carry helium and lost its derrick; by autumn the company was in receivership.
In the fall of 1925 Lila M. Wade of Horse Island had charge of District 12's school at Arbon Center, beside the oil well, and nearly seventy years later her obituary remembered her in Arbon's one-room schools.
In October 1925 the woman who had kept the Arbon post office was arraigned at Pocatello over $419.06 in missing funds, and the man who had carried the valley's mail was fined $100 for turning mail sacks into grain bags and saddle blankets.
Four years after he went into a veterans' hospital in Washington, Arbon homesteader and Navy volunteer Jesse Keeler came home to Pocatello for a funeral with taps and a Legion salute.
In the last days before the 1924 election, six women at the south end of Arbon Valley formed the Sunshine Canyon club and met each week to talk over the vote, child welfare and the lives of great women.
In August 1924 a smut explosion on the Ray Hatfield place in Arbon Valley burned Clive Hatfield's threshing outfit, 75 sacks of wheat, a wagon, a derrick and a stack.
Perry Lusk of Pauline took the Arbon Valley's seat on the Power County board in the Democratic sweep of 1922, then declined to run again in 1924, leaving the pioneer T. B. Evans to contest it.
In the spring of 1924 Ren Evans signed up 23 Arbon Valley farmers and 213 cows for a cheese factory backed by Ernest Brog of Driggs, but whether it ever made cheese is unknown.
In 1924 Crystal's taxpayers complained of the highest road and school tax in Power County and poor mail service, while the valley's mail and wheat kept wearing down the mountain road to Pocatello.
Eleven years after Arbon Valley voted itself into Power County, a delegation came to Pocatello in March 1924 to talk of joining Bannock instead, and in 1939 the idea surfaced once more.
In 1924 the Gem State Petroleum Co. set what was billed as Idaho's biggest oil rig beside Arbon's Central school, and for five years the valley watched it bore toward oil that never came.
A doctor's office, two stores and a grain warehouse gave Pauline hopes of becoming a town, and by 1923 its schoolchildren were cheering for "Pauline City."
Writing for the American Falls Press in the winter of 1923–24, Crystal's pupils predicted their settlement would be "almost deserted" and then reported, week by week, who left and who stayed.
For one school year the American Falls Press ran weekly news written by the pupils of Arbon Valley's country schools, misspellings included, and the first of it came from Pauline.
In October 1923 Power County's school superintendent, Mrs. Cora Darling, lived for two weeks among the country schools of Arbon Valley and Hawkins Basin, getting from one to the next by stage, grain rack, borrowed car and her own two feet.
In October 1923 rival buyers bid up wheat at Schiller, the valley's railroad siding, and into the spring teams and trucks hauled the crop there, 26 miles from Pauline.
In 1923 Arbon's telephone patrons threw a surprise party for Susannah Smith Evans, who had kept the valley's post office, store and switchboard, led its Red Cross and registered its voters.
After a season of spotty fields, daily rains, weeds above the grain and town men who lost their nerve, Arbon Valley's warehouse took in 29,008 sacks of wheat, a figure the paper first printed as bushels.
Days before the 1922 Roundup, a lantern led two Power County officers to a copper still hidden at Sunbeam, where a young Kentuckian was caught at work and charged with his uncle, a Pauline farmer.
In 1922 J. Parley Sorensen ran two headers on the Summit homestead he had proved up in 1914, land his descendants the Thompsons still farm and that Idaho named a Century Farm in 2024.