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 spring of 1914 Arbon farmers offered a right of way and $1,000 a mile in bonds to a promoter whose grain cars would hang from a single rail on posts, but no line was ever reported built.
At the end of a snowy winter in 1914, an American Falls store's monthly paper carried the Arbon news, almost certainly from Mrs. E. A. Logan, and the American Falls Press reprinted it.
In January 1914 the new Power County asked its voters for $125,000 in road bonds, with a trunk road promised from Arbon, and the valley turned them down.
From 1909 to 1914 the land-office notices in the American Falls Press tracked Arbon Valley homesteaders turning claims into titles, with neighbours standing witness and contests over claims nobody lived on.
In the valley's first harvest under Power County, the papers followed Arbon's wheat from the threshers to the railroad, through a farmers' co-operative, a call to Tulsa and three crop counts that never agreed.
On Christmas Eve 1913 Santa Claus brought presents, candy, nuts and oranges to 125 children at Arbon's Central school, and dances and sleighing parties filled the holiday week.
From 1913 to 1928 children of Arbon, Pauline and Buist wrote stories for the Sunday School's magazine, while Cora Sorensen of the Summit end spent thirty-three years teaching the youngest class.
In the summer of 1913 a Congregational minister mailed a hill of dry-farmed wheat from Arbon with a report on the valley's crops, land and people, while he set about starting its first two Protestant churches.
Writing from Arbon the day after a divided Fourth of July in 1913, B. W. Rice sized up the valley's grain and named its farmers one by one, and within days two Congregational churches were organized there.
In June 1913 John Ryan, a hand on the Evans and Daniels ranch on Bannock Creek, sold a load of hogs in Pocatello, left his team in a shed and dropped out of sight.
In June 1913 homesteaders south of the Mink Creek divide fought sheep permits on the Pocatello forest reserve, and when someone proposed turning it into an elk refuge, T. B. Smith wrote to the paper that the settlers needed summer grass, not game.
In June 1913 a man from Arbon brought word to Pocatello that Short Line engineers were surveying a branch railroad over the Malad divide and down Bannock Valley.
For nearly twenty years the Logan papers followed Jack King of North Logan to his Arbon dry farm and home again, through a dry 1931, a hopeful 1932 and the death of his wife Ruby that August.
In May 1913 the commissioners of the new Power County spent four days looking over roads at Crystal and Arbon, opening a season of petitions, a rival offer from Pocatello and a change of road overseer.
In 1912 and 1913 Pocatello's businessmen and the Arbon farmers pledged money for a road over the Trail Creek divide, until a reservation right of way and a shortfall of cash stopped it.
When American Falls cut a new road into Arbon Valley in 1912 and drew off its grain, Pocatello's paper raised the alarm and an Arbon farmer came to town asking for a road over Trail Creek.
On a December morning in 1912 two Whiting brothers from Crystal took out marriage licenses in Pocatello minutes apart, neither knowing the other was marrying.
Told by the old-timers that nothing would ripen at his altitude, Arbon homesteader G. S. Butler ended up supplying them with potatoes and won over the Kansas father who had predicted his failure.
Between 1911 and 1919 the land notices and valley columns of the American Falls Press followed Arbon and Crystal women as they proved up land in their own names, from wives' desert claims to a mother and her daughters on Cherry Creek.
A five-dollar fine against Buist's postmistress in 1912 opens a look at the families who came to the south end of Arbon Valley from Brigham City, Garland and Spanish Fork as well as Mendon.
In the spring of 1912 the *Pocatello Tribune* followed Arbon rancher John C. Cairns from Dublin to Halifax and home again, where the valley met him with a supper and dance.
When G. S. Randall of Arbon went home to Somerset, Kentucky, in December 1911, he went as a man who had made good, and the papers then follow the Kentucky families who came to the valley, stayed and left.
In November 1911 four children whose father, known in Nevada as "Indian Mike," had once farmed on Bannock Creek as Jim Taggert were brought from a Nevada school to Fort Hall after the fight that killed most of their family.
In October 1911 the Fort Hall superintendent opened the Arbon–American Falls road down Bannock Creek to the public, with no camping or fires and escorts for driven stock.
A near miss by lightning at Summit in 1911 is the first the valley papers say of Charles and Jean Ann Orison, whose family they followed between Arbon Valley and Logan until 1990.
In September 1911 Mattie Nunnelley left American Falls on the morning train with Herman Noth, and over the next eight years the Press followed the couple to a ranch at Arbon and to her early death.
In September 1911 the *American Falls Press* awarded Arbon's dry-land alfalfa a blue ribbon in print, the high point of the valley's part in Farmers' Day, the farm show American Falls held each fall from 1908.
In 1911 the American Falls Press watched Arbon's wheat go from July guesses to steam threshers to wagon trains at the railroad, and an editor saw in six lines how far the valley had come.
In July 1911 Idaho's land selector looked over the Moonshine and Rattlesnake country for land for the state, and found that most of the good land on Rattlesnake Creek was ceded Fort Hall land.
On a Sunday in July 1911, four American Falls men put 127 miles on an automobile circling Bannock Peak, lunching off a well trough and calling on Arbon's pioneers as they came home through the valley.