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.
Between 1920 and 1925 the Arbon valley's dry farmers raised good wheat and still lost ground to falling prices, high freight, scarce credit, failed banks and tax deeds, until two-dollar wheat came back.
In June 1921 some 2,000 visitors came to the Toyn ranch for barbecue, ball games and a look at Arbon Valley's first oil well, which the papers then followed through sixteen months of shows and promises.
For a few summers in the early 1920s Pauline, the Arbon Bears and the South Arbon Cubs played ball against each other and against American Falls, most memorably on a dust-deep diamond at the 1921 oil celebration.
George Arbon, oldest of the valley's first settlers and the man Arbon was named for, died at his son's Malad home in March 1921, after decades of lost crops elsewhere.
On St. Patrick's Day 1921 W. H. Ball shot a neighbor on the road near Pauline and a deputy sheriff at his cabin, and before the year was out two Power County juries had let him go.
Snow fell on Arbon Valley before the 1920 threshing was done, and through a long winter the Arbon column of the American Falls Press kept track of the stranded grain, the families who left for town, the dances of those who stayed and a spring that kept turning back to snow.
In November 1920 the horses, combine and hay of Lucien McLarry, who had bought the Parley Bailey place at Arbon two years before, sold at auction, and by 1922 the Bailey land was tied up in court.
Under a foot of snow in November 1920, Pauline voted the Nonpartisan League ticket that ran its own Jack McCool for county commissioner, Arbon held to the Republicans, and Crystal's returns tipped the county's Senate count by a single vote.
In the wet spring of 1920 Arbon Valley farmers signed about 80 per cent of a promising crop over to the new Wheat Growers Association, then watched wheat prices slide through a long, hard winter.
In May 1920 the whole valley crowded into Central Hall to send off David B. Ripley and his wife, who had sold their east-side ranch and were moving to Oregon.
Two months after their Malad wedding, Elmer and Susan Ward moved out to their Arbon farm in May 1920, starting a life split between town and valley that the papers followed until all three of their surviving children called Arbon home.
Through the 1919–20 school year the Arbon columns followed a lone teacher and her Central school pupils from basketry and thrift verses to debates, a smoking stove and four eighth-grade graduates.
In the spring of 1920 Arbon's farmers incorporated a range association to keep the migrating sheep bands off their canyons and hills, and by midsummer a deputy was riding the ranges and sheepmen were standing trial at Pauline.
In the spring of 1920 Arbon Valley's farmers chose a day to spread strychnine bait against the ground squirrels eating their wheat, part of a Power County campaign that ran for years and cost Ed Davis four of his best horses.
Charles A. Bailey of Wellsville made the first homestead entry on the Arbon floor in 1901, proved up three years later and died in 1905, and his widow Grace took their children home to Cache Valley.
Through two years of war the Red Cross women of Arbon, Crystal and Pauline sewed, knitted and held suppers for the soldiers, and in October 1919 they gave the returning men a ball at the Crystal hall.
With the last of Crystal's soldiers home from the war, W. C. and Cora Snyder gave the men, their families and their friends a Sunday dinner at their home in September 1919.
In 1919 Arbon Valley's new highway district started grading and graveling the Bannock Creek road, lost two contractors' trucks to fire, and by August was counting on the road work to carry farmers through a drought.
Before daylight on December 23, 1918, B. O. Kelley, hauling Pauline wheat for the Zaring Grain Company, drove his truck off the Bannock Creek bridge at Pauline and was killed, two days before Christmas.
In the fall of 1918 the Spanish influenza reached Arbon Valley a few weeks after its one doctor had gone back to Pocatello, and whole families fell ill together.
Brothers Horace and Roy Humphrey kept smiling through good years and bad on the dry farms of Arbon and Crystal, and two of Horace's Arbon-born sons later made their way to Barrow, Alaska, and Promontory, Utah.
In July 1918 the Power County commissioners heard a petition from Arbon Valley residents for a herd district and, with no one standing against it, created the district on July 27.
In 1918 Arbon Valley expected nearly half a million bushels of wheat with the railroad 25 to 35 miles away, and its call for motor trucks reached the national trade press.
One after another, four daughters of W. A. Nunnelley of Summit trained as nurses, and the papers traced them through a Navy enlistment, the influenza of 1918–19 and a Logan diploma in 1920.
In June 1918 the Pocatello Tribune called the Nonpartisan League's charge that Pauline wheat had rotted "rank fiction," a month after its own report that some of it had spoiled.
Sacked wheat bought in the fall of 1917 lay uncovered at a Pauline grain platform into the next summer, and while the nation saved wheat for the war, the Nonpartisan League carried its spoiling to Herbert Hoover.
When the Fort Hall lands on lower Bannock Creek were divided into allotments, the valley's road to Michaud had to move, Pauline farmers leased allotted ground, and by 1922 the land of allottees who had died was up for sale.
On one May night in 1918, Arbon outbid the speakers from American Falls for a Red Cross cake while Pauline heard four speakers and Crystal raised its whole quota before going home.
In the fall of 1917 many Arbon Valley families left their farms for the winter, a few stayed by choice, and in March 1918 the valley columns counted them home.
A 1918 notice of a Relief Society social at Crystal opens a trail through six years of valley columns and, decades on, the obituaries that named the women who ran those societies.