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 September 1957 Indian and white stockmen spent six days riding through snow and then dust to gather about 1,200 cattle off the reservation range on Bannock Creek, and Merle Meyers, raised at Crystal, rode along and wrote it up.
For ten years Utah papers followed Sod Williams of Arbon and his quarter horses, from Poco Star's placings at Ogden to the clinics where he was billed to teach reining.
In November 1955 Clyde Jenson, a Summit dry farmer, lent a violin said to be a Guarneri del Gesù to the Utah Symphony's concertmaster for a campus recital and a Tabernacle concert.
D. J. Bowen, who crossed into Arbon Valley in 1892, kept its first post office and led its first congregation, died in Pocatello on September 24, 1955, at 93.
In the mid-1950s Arbon kept a Ground Observer Corps post under Mrs. Lee Newport, and a Pocatello recruiter held the valley up as a town where half the people had trained as plane spotters.
In March 1955 Rodney Smith and Calvin Williams, two young men off Arbon Valley farms, pulled a toboggan into snowbound Garden Creek basin, lived six days in a tent and came out sure of a good water year.
Roy D. Lindley, who came to Arbon Valley in 1911 and long sat on the Power County board, was killed hunting bobcats on Bannock Creek in December 1954.
In 1954 a pickup taken at Lava Hot Springs and then a missing Pocatello man's body turned up in Arbon Valley, and by fall twenty ranchers had organized to patrol the valley through the winter.
In May 1954 Gene Bailey, 17, a grandson of Arbon's Lorenzo Bailey, left the family ranch on foot toward the mountains, and sixteen months passed before a valley rancher on horseback found his body in the hills.
Liza Iversen followed her brothers to their Arbon Valley homesteads, married the neighboring homesteader John J. Infanger at sixteen in 1914, and died in Pocatello on her 56th birthday.
In 1954 the papers caught up with D. J. Bowen, 92, who had led Arbon's first congregation, buried a second wife and was still visiting families for his Pocatello ward 75 years after his first calls.
In February 1954 a freezing fog that would not lift coated the wires around Arbon with frost until 12,500-volt lines bowed nearly to the ground and poles snapped.
John H. Meyers, a rancher and stockman who came to Arbon Valley in 1900 and raised his family on the Crystal side, died at his valley home on October 9, 1953, at 63.
A man hired to help bring in the 1953 harvest on Joseph G. Arbon's ranch was caught trying to sell his employer's goods to a neighbor and pleaded guilty to grand larceny.
Married at Malad in 1903, John and Beatrice Bolingbroke spent some forty years ranching at Pauline, wintering in Malad when school was in, and kept their golden wedding at their Pocatello home in 1953.
Two Oregon men who came to Arbon Valley together in 1910, Paul A. "Cy" Smith and Frank Turner, kept company through homesteads, war, flu and old age, and died three months apart in 1953.
Twayne Austin, Pocatello's Continental Oil agent and the stake president over Arbon's congregation, died in November 1952 when his tank truck rolled off Highway 37 as he drove home from the valley.
In May 1952 Arbon Valley voted 54 to 18 to dissolve Highway District No. 3, the road district it had formed in 1918, and leave its roads to Power County.
Ross Saxton laid nearly all his Arbon dry farm out in contour strips by 1952, and over the next dozen years the valley's hill ground brought a harvest gadget praised by two Arbon men and a fatal combine accident.
Carl Axel Johnson, a bachelor from Sweden who tended stock and land on the Wright ranch at Crystal from about 1914 until 1948, died in Pocatello in February 1952.
In December 1951 Power County delegates asked the state highway commission to put the Arbon Valley road on the federal secondary system, one step in an eight-year campaign for better roads out of the valley.
In the fall of 1951 Mrs. G. W. Bradley taught four children at Mercer Creek, a school kept open because snow and missing phones cut the Crystal country off from Arbon; by 1955 it and the Crystal school stood empty.
In June 1951 Arbon Valley ranchers joined a Power County posse hunting a Michigan couple and their small daughter, who fled a theft on Bannock Creek and walked more than 30 miles over the mountains to Inkom.
Two years after helping launch Power County's soil conservation district, LeRoy Lindley of Arbon striped his own hillside wheat farm with contour strips that his neighbors had never seen before.
On a rainy night in November 1950 a light plane out of Pocatello went down near Rattlesnake Creek in upper Arbon Valley, killing a flight instructor and his two students.
For three winters starting in 1948, people who lived in Arbon Valley or once had met in Pocatello for a dinner, a program and a dance, and in 1950 about 175 of them filled the Grange hall.
In the fall of 1949 Standard Oil Company of California sought state land west of Arbon, and within two months it held leases in a valley that had gone hunting for oil once before.
Charles Ethen Norton, who came to Idaho as a boy of eleven and had a homestead on the Crystal side of Arbon Valley by 1917, died at home on August 5, 1949, at 73.
In the mid-February blizzard of 1949, a Rattlesnake rancher skied nine miles to report that some 60 families had gone three weeks without supplies, and a weasel brought a sick man out from Mercer Creek after a rescue plane stuck in the snow.
Just before Christmas 1948, the West Pocatello Stake's Mutual gave a party with a Nativity program, gifts and Santa Claus for 104 guests from the Fort Hall reservation at Arbon's Bannock Creek school.