In Arbon Valley, dryland wheat waits on the sky
From a 1994 plan to seed the clouds to a crop rescued by May rain in 2020, the farm press followed Arbon Valley's dryland wheat growers through good years and bad.
Articles.
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.
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Routine notices (meeting notices, reminders and classifieds) are left out of this list; find them under Notices.
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Governor points to Arbon Valley as farmers and deer hunters make peace
In 1989 Idaho's governor praised Arbon Valley's farmers and deer hunters for settling their quarrel, and over the next decade the valley's ranchers found themselves in the West's wider argument over mountain lions.
When the range burns, Arbon Valley farmers bring their tractors
From the Mosho fire of 1988 to the Power Line fire of 2016, range fires kept burning in and around Arbon Valley, and the farmers kept turning out to fight them.
Church agrees to pay taxes on its Arbon farm, and the school's worries ease
A 1982 quarrel between Power County and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over taxes on a 6,742-acre Arbon Valley farm, which had left the Arbon school's future in doubt, ended that December in a compromise under which the church would pay.
Arbon Valley cuts a good wheat crop at a poor price
In August 1982 Arbon Valley growers cut a sound dryland wheat crop they expected to sell at a loss, the latest turn in three decades of late harvests, drought and rain-soaked fields.
Two boys lost after a head-on crash on Arbon Valley Road
In August 1982 a carload of young people and a pickup collided head-on on Arbon Valley Road, killing Harley Hatch, 13, of May, and leaving Brett Lusk, 13, of Arbon Valley, to die of his injuries nine days later.
Arbon Valley woman, 46, dies when car leaves the road at Fort Hall
Mabellene McKie, 46, of Arbon Valley was killed late on June 5, 1982, when the car carrying her and her husband went off a Fort Hall road, struck a pole and ended in a canal.
Snowmobiles, full pantries and neighbors carry Arbon Valley through a hard winter
After a January of drifts, deep cold, a stalled school bus and a flood warning, the *Journal* went out to Arbon Valley in February 1982 to see how its farm and ranch families were getting by.
State puts its Arbon Valley school land on the auction block
In early 1981 Idaho auctioned school endowment farmland in Arbon Valley, and 120 acres near Pauline and a full section near Crystal went for far more than the appraisers had expected.
Fifty years on, Willard and Mamie Andersen look back to Arbon
A 1981 golden-wedding notice traced the lives of Willard Andersen, a dry-farm boy who became Arbon's bishop, and Mamie Haney, who came west from South Carolina.
At 56, Arbon Valley's Sherm Swim says he can't quit roping
In June 1980 the Journal profiled Sherm Swim, the Arbon Valley cattleman who took the 1979 old-timers' roping in Pocatello, and the next March it pictured him and his son Kirk with a calf mauled by coyotes.
California pilot killed as his Cessna falls on an Arbon Valley farm
Half an hour out of Idaho Falls in a spring snowstorm, a Huntington Beach pilot was killed when his Cessna struck a field on a Johnson farm in Arbon Valley on April 6, 1980.
Arbon's two-teacher school wins a year for a teacher without his degree
In 1979 the 20-pupil Arbon school district persuaded the State Board of Education to let it keep a teacher who lacked his degree, one chapter in a decade of merger talk, refusals and cost-sharing for a very small district.
A university crew goes door to door to map Arbon Valley's past
In November 1979 a six-member crew from the Idaho Museum of Natural History at Idaho State University began calling on Arbon Valley families for what its curator of archaeology said was the valley's first systematic survey of historic places.
State trooper delivers a baby girl in a station wagon near Arbon Valley
On a July evening in 1978 a mother racing for the hospital ran out of time, and Idaho State Police trooper Brad Flores delivered her daughter in the back of a station wagon in the Arbon Valley area.
Arbon neighbors still brand by rope and by hand
In the spring of 1978 Arbon ranchers went from place to place roping and branding close to 1,200 calves, and the *Journal* came out to photograph their day at Sod Williams's ranch.
Salt Lake City rider wins a 60-mile bicycle race to Arbon Valley
On May 28, 1978, the senior men in a Pocatello bicycle race rode 60 miles over Crystal Summit to Arbon Valley and back, and Tom Webb of Salt Lake City was fastest.
Two Bannock Creek stockmen take opposite sides in a forest grazing fight
In May 1978 a Bannock Creek rancher and a young Shoshone-Bannock stockman from the same creek each told a federal judge he might have to sell cattle if the forest grazing case went against his side.
Bannock Creek man dies as pickup rolls on the Arbon road
Wally Hardy, 40, of Bannock Creek was killed on Sunday, March 26, 1978, when the pickup he was riding in rolled three times on Arbon Road some eight miles north of the Arbon store.
Expecting one, a Buist couple welcomes three
On the last afternoon of 1977, Denver and Lucinda Sweeten of Buist, both 19, became the parents of triplets, and a year later the Journal came back to see how the three were growing.
On horseback to the school bus, an Arbon Valley family remembers the winters
In 1976 Jessie Hubbard told a Utah food columnist how weather ruled her family's Arbon Valley dry farm, where in winter her husband David sometimes rode six miles on horseback to reach his school bus.
Arbon's Latter-day Saints, the branch the papers kept calling a ward
A 1976 missionary farewell at Arbon, and the obituaries of the farmers who led its Latter-day Saint branch, show Utah papers calling the valley's branch a ward long after it had stopped being one.
Arbon Valley land goes up for sale in the Utah want ads
For eight years the classified pages of Salt Lake City and Logan papers offered pieces of Arbon Valley, from canyon recreation ground and a cattle range to barnwood, big dry farms and, in 1983, a 320-acre farm the government wanted to sell.
Mormon crickets on the march in Arbon Valley
In the late summer of 1975 swarms of Mormon crickets were crawling through Arbon Valley's fields, two years after a grasshopper campaign and sixteen years before the insects came down from the hills again.
The last of George Arbon's children dies in Los Angeles at 90
Eva Arbon Andersen, youngest child of the man Arbon was named for, died in Los Angeles in 1973, twenty years after her sister Mayme Baker, homesteader, rancher and Pocatello hotelkeeper, died in Pocatello.
A weekend drive through Arbon Valley to the ruts at Twin Springs
In 1973 the *Idaho State Journal* sent weekend campers over Mink Creek, through Pauline and Arbon, to Twin Springs on the Hudspeth Cutoff, where gold-rush wagon tracks still crossed the hills.
Jack and Stella Price, wed at Arbon in 1913, mark sixty years
Jack and Stella Price, married at Arbon in 1913 in the earliest wedding yet found in the valley, marked sixty years in 1973 after three decades of ranching on the West Fork and the early loss of their eldest daughter.
Two men of 1875, a bishop and a lawmaker, die eight months apart
Joe Arbon, Arbon Valley's first bishop, and William Allard, the first valley man found in the Idaho Legislature, were born ten weeks apart in 1875 and died in Pocatello eight months apart in 1972 and 1973.
At 97, old West Fork homesteader George Daniels Sr. still weeds his own garden
At 97, George Daniels Sr., Oneida County's oldest man and once a homesteader on the West Fork of Bannock Creek, recalled a runaway horse herd, a river crossing, old injuries and the square dances he called in Arbon Valley.
Fort Hall tribes hold 300 head said to be Sod Williams's cattle
In March 1972 the Fort Hall tribes impounded more than 300 cattle on Bannock Creek range that they said belonged to the Arbon rancher Sod Williams, and vowed to keep them until the damage was paid for.