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.
Ralph G. Butler, a son of Pauline homesteaders, kept a diary of the Pacific war that his mother saved after he was lost with the USS Monaghan in a 1944 typhoon, and in 1971 two Idaho State historians readied it for print.
Closing his Arimo barber shop in 1971, Sim Hatch recalled the years he and his brother Abe ran 130 horses in Bannock Valley and on Dairy Creek, until the slump after the First World War broke them both.
Joe Morse Evans, the second son of the Arbon pioneers Ren and Anna Evans, spent years in Pocatello's mills, came home to farm at Arbon in 1947 and died on September 12, 1971, at 72.
David Siewert, born in Russia to German parents, proved up a homestead at Crystal, held on there while drought and debt emptied the basin, and died at Calgary, Canada, in June 1971 at 83.
Retiring from the Malad schools in 1971, Hazel Lusk and Sarah Beard looked back on their early country schools at Buist, where the pay was $70 a month, the water came from home and one horse bit.
In the fall of 1970 Arbon-area parents went to the Oneida School Board at Malad hoping to change a system that brought a bus into their country only twelve weeks a year.
In September 1970 an elderly Fort Hall sheepherder left a broken-down pickup near Bannock Peak and made his own way home while deputies, volunteers, a plane and two mounted parties hunted for him.
A letter from Arbon, Switzerland, set aside in 1966, led Nelda Williams to write a history of Arbon Valley that the Swiss town's newspaper had printed with pictures of her family by November 1969.
As she neared 84 in 1970, Martha Thyberg recalled scrubbing clothes on a washboard by a creek as a young wife, in the years after her husband built their Arbon Valley cabin with his own hands.
In the summer of 1969 Intermountain Gas Co. had a test well drilled on Donald Porter's farm near Arbon, but it went down 3,677 feet without a show of oil or gas.
When the state moved a planned freeway interchange away from Bannock Creek in 1969, Arbon Valley ranchers and their neighbors packed a hearing to ask for it back, and by September they had it.
As Pocatello first-grade teacher Lettie Allard faced retirement in 1969, a student reporter's profile also caught a rare glimpse of her husband, the Arbon homesteader William Allard, at 93.
Marine Lt. Reese Andersen, twenty-five, of Arimo and Arbon Valley, was killed by an accidental gunshot near Quang Tri in April 1969 and buried at Arimo two weeks later.
As he neared 89 in 1969, Charles Connelly told a Pocatello paper about thirteen years on a Crystal homestead, where snow buried the cabin, wheat went to Arimo by sled and a blizzard once hid the way home.
Months after a fire took everything the Mac Orison and Charles Orison Jr. families owned, Arbon Valley invited all comers to a potluck supper and fiddle music at the Arbon church on their behalf.
Don Jenson came to Arbon Valley as a boy, farmed there until his death in 1968 though he lived in Pocatello from 1940, and served in two Arbon ward bishoprics.
When a drift closed the Arbon Valley road in December 1967, a Snowville mother and her two sons walked to a distant house, got through the night on an old mattress and two blankets, and caught a ride home while the Highway Patrol hunted for them.
In November 1967 Kay Bailey of Arbon sang a Broadway medley to win the Idaho Farm Bureau's state senior talent find and a trip to the national convention in Chicago.
Early on October 3, 1967, two-year-old LaGrande Shay of an Arbon Valley family was struck and killed by a car on Highway 30 about three miles west of Pocatello.
In 1967 Arbon Valley invited everyone who had ever lived there back for a reunion, and the old papers show where five of its homestead families had gone.
In May 1967 every one of the twenty children at Arbon's two-room school had a part in a graduation that handed diplomas to three eighth-grade boys, and the pupils set out to write a history of their valley.
When Emma "Minnie" Green, the Pocatello medium said to have advised Ben Ross, turned 100 in 1967, her profile went back to her ranch at Crystal and the bad road over Gumbo Hill.
In 1967 a Pocatello paper honored Mary Bailey Renberg, who grew up on the Bailey ranch at Arbon, for 33 years as secretary of the Bannock County extension office, a job meant to last three days.
In December 1965 Arbon Valley gave up the hand-worked switchboard that had carried every call for fifty years, first in the Evans home and then the Newports', and went over to dial telephones the ranchers paid for themselves.
Maurice Poppie, who followed his mother's brothers from Kansas to Arbon Valley in 1909 and farmed there for most of his life, died in Pocatello in November 1965.
Luther M. Estep came from Kentucky to Pauline in 1915, buried a baby son that first autumn, lost another son in the war, and farmed in Arbon Valley until his sudden death in 1965.
Richard S. Christensen, 47, a Brigham City dry farmer cutting grain in Arbon Valley, died on September 24, 1965, when his combine went over on a hillside and rolled onto him.
Days before Joe Arbon turned 90, a Pocatello paper printed his memories of the valley named for his father, from a dirt-floored cabin and a saddle fund to the first church and the dances he played for.
Lorenzo M. Evans, the eldest child of the Arbon pioneer Ren Evans, farmed the valley for most of his 67 years, also ran a potato warehouse, and died after a long illness on June 24, 1965.
In June 1965 more than a hundred Pocatello businessmen and Arbon Valley farmers shared breakfast up Mink Creek and toured the valley from Sod Williams's ranch to a proposed dam on Bannock Creek, and a week later a guest scolded the Journal for reporting a tour it never joined.