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.
In the winter of 1962 two floods a month apart broke the oiled road up Bannock Creek, stranding families and idling the Arbon school bus, and the creek had run over that road before and would again.
Half a century after Jay and Marcena Whiting went to homestead at Crystal, their twelve children threw them a golden wedding party in Pocatello on the weekend the whole Whiting clan came together.
Minutes after leaving the Pocatello airport in a rainstorm on March 24, 1961, Gayle E. Waters of Utah was killed when his small plane came down near Bannock Peak, some five miles northwest of Pauline.
William N. Jones came from Dayton, Washington, to a homestead near Pauline, farmed there about eleven years, then worked on the American Falls dam and the moving of the town.
Otto Andersen's death in 1960, between John's golden wedding in 1956 and Ezra's death in 1964, closed the story of the Mendon brothers who settled at the head of Bannock Creek.
In 1960 Arbon Valley farmer Clyde Jenson handed a violin called a 1704 Stradivarius to the guest soloist at a Pocatello symphony concert, and nine years later he was billed to play it himself.
When Arbon teacher Neil S. Miller, 65, ran his truck off the Mink Creek road on May 23, 1960, more than two hours passed before anyone came upon him.
In April 1960 a reservation policeman and three men reached a skeleton, two old rifles and a powder horn under a boulder in the Bannock Creek district, and a Pocatello man wondered if the trapper Old Yank had gone there to die.
At a Senate hearing in Twin Falls in 1960, Arbon Valley cattleman Lloyd Brower told how a quarrel with sheepmen moved his herd onto the national forest, and objected to a 40 percent cut there.
In December 1959 Lamond J. Bailey of Arbon, signing himself "A Surplus Farmer," wrote to a Pocatello column that the government should end farm subsidies and leave business alone.
In October 1959 three-year-old David Earl Stohl died on his family's Arbon farm after reaching for a toy shovel in the hopper of the power auger his father was using to load grain.
In September 1959 a state engineer said 43 miles of Highway 38 through Arbon Valley were days from done, the biggest piece of a few years in which the valley's roads were oiled one stretch at a time.
John C. Andersen, who came to the head of Bannock Creek as a boy in the 1890s and later served his ward, a school board and a highway board, died at Clifton on August 1, 1959, three months after his wife.
In one week of July 1959 the Bannock Creek district lost Frank Bell, found in the creek below his footbridge, and William Lipps, 88, a former president of its cattlemen's association.
A lightning fire near Crystal in July 1958 was thought stopped, came back on the wind and burned 3,000 acres, one of a string of range fires the papers reported around Arbon Valley from 1948 to 1978.
A Pocatello Chamber of Commerce farm tour stood on the Mink Creek divide on July 11, 1958, and heard that 76 farms held the 59,827 acres of cropland in the Arbon-Crystal district.
From Sod Williams's prize quarter horse in 1958 to his great-grandson's rodeo title in 2025, the papers followed an Arbon ranch family through the show ring and the arena.
In March 1958 a farmer named Bradley helped a mired car out of the mud near Arbon, saw that its plates had been smeared over and called the sheriff, and two boys in a stolen Ford were stopped at Downey 40 minutes later.
In September 1957 Indian and white stockmen spent six days riding through snow and then dust to gather about 1,200 cattle off the reservation range on Bannock Creek, and Merle Meyers, raised at Crystal, rode along and wrote it up.
For ten years Utah papers followed Sod Williams of Arbon and his quarter horses, from Poco Star's placings at Ogden to the clinics where he was billed to teach reining.
In November 1955 Clyde Jenson, a Summit dry farmer, lent a violin said to be a Guarneri del Gesù to the Utah Symphony's concertmaster for a campus recital and a Tabernacle concert.
D. J. Bowen, who crossed into Arbon Valley in 1892, kept its first post office and led its first congregation, died in Pocatello on September 24, 1955, at 93.
In the mid-1950s Arbon kept a Ground Observer Corps post under Mrs. Lee Newport, and a Pocatello recruiter held the valley up as a town where half the people had trained as plane spotters.
In March 1955 Rodney Smith and Calvin Williams, two young men off Arbon Valley farms, pulled a toboggan into snowbound Garden Creek basin, lived six days in a tent and came out sure of a good water year.
Roy D. Lindley, who came to Arbon Valley in 1911 and long sat on the Power County board, was killed hunting bobcats on Bannock Creek in December 1954.
In 1954 a pickup taken at Lava Hot Springs and then a missing Pocatello man's body turned up in Arbon Valley, and by fall twenty ranchers had organized to patrol the valley through the winter.
In May 1954 Gene Bailey, 17, a grandson of Arbon's Lorenzo Bailey, left the family ranch on foot toward the mountains, and sixteen months passed before a valley rancher on horseback found his body in the hills.
Liza Iversen followed her brothers to their Arbon Valley homesteads, married the neighboring homesteader John J. Infanger at sixteen in 1914, and died in Pocatello on her 56th birthday.
In 1954 the papers caught up with D. J. Bowen, 92, who had led Arbon's first congregation, buried a second wife and was still visiting families for his Pocatello ward 75 years after his first calls.
In February 1954 a freezing fog that would not lift coated the wires around Arbon with frost until 12,500-volt lines bowed nearly to the ground and poles snapped.