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.
Walt Andersen and Wealthy Gibbons of Arbon were married at the Andersen reunion in Mendon in June 1916, and by Christmas her father had taken out a licence to marry Walt's sister Catherine.
Seven years after one newspaper mailed to Dayton drew the first Washington homesteaders to Arbon Valley, their settlement held a three-day picnic in Bull Canyon in June 1916 and invited everyone.
An American Falls paper made pioneer John Payne the mayor of Arbon in fun, and over the next two years its columns showed a retired Short Line engineer at work as dry farmer, sawmill owner, justice and would-be county commissioner.
For eight years Arbon Valley farmers petitioned, met, signed notes at a dollar an acre and backed one railroad scheme after another, and in May 1916 the promoters carried the plan to American Falls, but no line was ever built.
Arbon's first community fair, held at the Central school on May 10, 1916, had a band, exhibits and speeches until a borrowed car overturned, and a few weeks later William Allard answered an unsigned critic of the day.
In the spring of 1916 the Pauline schoolhouse became a polling place, and that fall two valley men, Gus Brahmstadt and John Noble, ran for the valley's seat on the Power County board.
Storms buried Arbon Valley in about three feet of snow in early 1916 and cut its new telephone line; in February the paper reported the first vehicle out since winter began.
Through the stormy winter of 1915–16, neighbors at the north end of Arbon Valley crowded into the Central school on Tuesday nights to recite, read, play music and debate everything from mules to a high school for Arbon.
In 1915 Lola Skartvedt began cooking hot noon lunches with her pupils in a bare shack school on Clifton Creek near Crystal, and the county paper said the idea should spread statewide.
In the stormy late fall of 1915 the pupils of Arbon's Central school gave a Thanksgiving program and a Christmas Eve cantata, and the *Press* printed every part and nearly every child's name.
Arbon Valley formed its own telephone company in 1913 and talked over barbed wire for two years until the long-distance line from American Falls finally reached it in December 1915.
In 1915 Power County hurried a road for Bannock Valley north across the Fort Hall Reservation before allotment could shut the way, then fell to quarreling over who should pay for it.
In the fall of 1915, while smut ran through Arbon Valley wheat, Power County's new agent found none in Henry Shandrew's grain, and that same year a plant taken from a field near Arbon became a wheat immune to bunt.
A family from Dayton, Washington, came into Arbon by wagon after losing horses to poison on the road, in the same week that neighbors plowed fire guards to save 1,500 bushels of sacked grain near Knox Canyon.
In 1915 Arbon Valley sowed more wheat than ever, cut some of it with its first combines and threshed the rest with short-handed crews through a dry, fire-prone fall.
Through the summer and fall of 1915 the South Arbon news column followed hogs, grain, machinery and patients over the mountain road to Malad, the town the valley's south end relied on.
Through 1915 Arbon Valley carried its sick and hurt over the mountain to Malad, across the reservation to Pocatello or down to Ogden, until a long-distance telephone line reached the valley in December.
For more than thirty years the papers followed Peter M. Larsen, a Mendon schoolteacher, as he went back and forth between his Cache Valley home and his ranch at the Summit end of Arbon Valley.
Frank Phelps, a South Arbon farmer who first turns up in the papers in 1915, froze to death in 1934, and his only son, Bud, quit school at 14 to run the farm.
Pierce Hardman of Mendon took up a dry farm in Arbon Valley before he was twenty-one, and he and his wife Ella worked it for half a century, wintering in North Logan in later years.
In the summer of 1915 Arbon Valley decorated its graves, held a big Fourth of July picnic at the Central school on July 3 and crowded the Pauline L.D.S. grounds for Pioneer Day.
Jailed at Malad in 1915 on a forgery charge, L. E. Howell of South Arbon was suspected of an old West Virginia killing until two officers from that state came west and said he looked nothing like their man.
A year after frost took most of its wheat, Arbon Valley came down with what one correspondent called a spring malady, and by June 1915 about fifteen cars were running in the valley.
In 1915 Robert W. Sturges, a New York seminary student, spent four months as pastor of the Congregational churches at Arbon and Highland, then wrote about the valley.
Through 1915 the *American Falls Press* followed Arbon Valley homesteaders as they filed in Knox Canyon and on the ranges, drilled for water, built houses and sold out.
Elmira and Delone Smith, daughters of the Summit homesteader E. G. Smith, turn up again and again in the South Arbon column of 1915, and their obituaries carry the story on for seventy years.
In the spring of 1915 the Pauline nine wore new red suits, bought with help from a dance, as the valley's neighborhood teams met each other on Sunday afternoons.
A pile of logs at John Payne's sawmill in the spring of 1915 told Arbon's correspondent a building year was coming, and the paper's columns followed the canyon mills and the new houses through the season.
An old settler's 1915 memory of the winter that froze the Oregon herds opens three decades of glimpses of Bannock Valley as range for cattle and sheep, before wheat took it over.
In 1914 William Allard, a homesteader from Arbon, won the Republican primary and the November election to become the first man Power County sent to the Idaho House.