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 1917 and 1918 Arbon Valley's wheat farmers fought Jim Hill mustard, a weed that rolled across the country as a tumbleweed, and the Press's roving farm writer gave the weed a chance to boast.
In the first year of America's war, Arbon Valley's dry-farm wheat came through hail, heat and Jim Hill mustard to a thin harvest that sold for as much as $1.95 a bushel.
Eddie Davis and May Mathews of Arbon traveled to Cache Valley in December 1917 to marry in the Logan Temple, arrived the day it caught fire, and took the train to Salt Lake City to marry there.
Sophia Andersen never lived in Arbon Valley, yet from 1917 to her death in 1939 the papers show her Arbon sons, daughters and grandchildren making their way back to her house in Mendon, Utah.
From a 10-20 tractor plowing 350 acres in 1916 to a Fordson on a 1921 sale bill, the papers show the first tractors at work beside Arbon Valley's big horse teams.
In the fall of 1917, with coal scarce, an American Falls Press farm writer found Arbon Valley ranchers hauling fuel from the same canyons that had given them the logs for their cabins.
J. R. and Annie Bailey reached Arbon with ten cents, two cows and some debts, and by 1917 a farm writer found them on 560 acres, with a greased pig still part of the family lore at their golden wedding in 1940.
In November 1917 a Pauline wheat buyer followed a stolen load by lantern, and Deputy Sheriff Hy Secrist waited for the thieves behind a telephone pole.
Esther Davis kept house, kept chickens and kept the counter of the general store she and Ed Davis ran at Arbon, a valley landmark until 1931.
Six weeks after he was drafted in 1917, Park Lusk of Pauline had been promoted twice, and the papers went on to follow him, his brother Dave and the Bailey sisters they married through war, a young wife's death and the obituaries of the 1950s.
Isabelle Noble, 12, who helped behind the counter of her father's store at Pauline, died of a burst appendix in 1917, one of four children John and Fanny Noble buried between 1915 and 1921.
In the fall of 1917 David J. Bowen told the American Falls Press how he found water on Knox Creek in 1892, built a cabin of aspen logs the next year and became postmaster of the valley's first post office.
In the fall of 1917 Arbon and Crystal danced, built bonfires and stood for a cornetist's bugle calls to send the valley's first draft men off to Camp Lewis.
In the fall of 1917 the American Falls Press sent a farm writer who signed himself the Pilgrim over the roads of Crystal, Pauline and Arbon, mostly on foot, and he wrote down what he met along the way.
In the first week of September 1917 the Arbon correspondent of the American Falls Press told of an aeroplane that neighbors saw or heard crossing the valley after dark, a dozen years before any flight over Arbon was put on record.
Through 1917, while the new draft was still being drawn, young men of Arbon and Crystal walked into recruiting offices at Pocatello, Salt Lake City and Portland, and the papers set down their names a few at a time.
Crystal settlers set light poles toward Pocatello in the winter of 1917 with Commercial Club money, and by July the line was joined to Mountain States at a fifteen-cent toll.
In 1917 a deputy sheriff was stranded six hours in a June snowdrift, a mail carrier forded floodwater and a Portneuf bridge broke under a load of Crystal grain.
When the Blackfoot paper found Wallace Jenks leasing reservation land in May 1917, his family had already spent several years at Pauline, and some of them would stay on until the mortgages came due.
How Pauline got its store, school and post office, and how its Meadow Ward fared under its first bishop, Wilhelm F. Kowallis, from 1911 to his farewell in 1918.
Six years after it was a new settlement wanting a school, Crystal had about 150 families in a basin so well hidden that the American Falls Press said strangers could not find the road in.
In 1917 Mrs. E. A. Logan wrote down how a handful of squatters settled Bannock Valley in the 1890s, and in 1920 she told it again as a birthday tribute to George Arbon.
Married at Pocatello in the spring of 1915, Ida Featherston likely played the organ for a new Arbon Sunday school, died at her valley home in May 1916 and was sent home to Kansas for burial, and that fall her husband sold out at the valley's first farm auction.
From a 1916 parade to the Central school to the opening of Arbon's new hall in 1929, the valley kept every July 24 with programs, races, bucking contests and dances that ran late.
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.