Imagine the area east of the Grand Teton Mall before settlers arrived. Persistent sagebrush rose high in the wild pasture, but no power lines, fences, or even trees blocked the lonely view, clear up to the east foothills. In the winter only wild animals trailed through the deep snowdrifts. Summertime winds whistled over the waist-high prairie grasses, tossing it in alternating directions, like a child stroking a dog’s fur from side to side. Before 1885, not a single house or cabin had been built in this place known as Lower Willow Creek and later South Iona. When early settlers filed land claims that year, it would be another eight years before citizens decided to name the community “Ammon.”
Some of the original homesteaders included James C. Owen and his five sons: James Albert (known as Albert or Al), William, Joseph, Daniel, and Nathaniel Owen. Each of these six men staked his own 160 acres, built a home, and cleared land for farming on both sides of today’s Ammon Road, between 17th Street and Sunnyside.
A few years later family patriarch James C. Owen, then in his 70s, decided he was too old to work the wild land. He and his wife gave up their homestead, headed back to the comforts of Ogden, and donated their 160 acres for an official townsite. James charged his sons Albert and William with subdividing the land into one acre homesites which were to be sold for $1 each. In 1905 citizens incorporated the village and formed a school district.
Today the Ammon city limits spread along portions of the east side of Idaho Falls and sprawl toward the foothills, encompassing 4,717 acres; and according to City Planner Ron Folsom, the 2010 census places the population at 13,816. To honor the family who struggled to civilize the land, an east/west street named “Owen” runs through town on the north side of Ammon Elementary, and dead-ends in front of Sand Creek Middle School.
Ada Owen Campbell recorded the story of one of the Owen sons: her father, James Albert Owen. Al left his Utah home at the tender age of fifteen after being told he was old enough to fend for himself. Finding odd jobs along the way, he ended up laying rails for the railroad through Eagle Rock in 1879. Al was impressed with the opportunities here, but he and his brothers caught gold fever and headed to the mines in Leesburg, south of Salmon.
By 1885 they had made enough gold to settle down and convinced their father to join them in homesteading land east of Eagle Rock in the Snake River Valley. Each man brought a wagon crammed with household goods and a heart full of dreams for the future.
Albert constructed outbuildings and a cabin with a dirt floor on his acreage, and began the monumental task of clearing and leveling the wild land in preparation for planting. With rudimentary tools, he grubbed sagebrush and coaxed a hand plow through the virgin soil. In the spring of 1886 he planted his first grain by broadcasting the seed by hand, and in the fall harvested it with a complex one-man scythe known as a grain cradle. He also planted potatoes, reportedly some of the first to grow in the valley, and maintained a large apple orchard.
Marriageable women were hard to find on the frontier. At thirty-seven, bachelor Al finally proposed to his neighbor’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Rosa Ellingford. The couple entertained at dances: Al on the fiddle, and Rosa on the harmonica. They married and ended up having twelve children who all lived to maturity.
In 1912 Albert and some of his children witnessed the miracle of a “flying machine” landing in Idaho Falls. Al brought them in his surrey buggy to Reno Park (now Tautphaus) for a demonstration of the Wright Exhibition Flying Team. The plane took off with a terrific roar, “creating intense upward suction” and a choking curtain of dust, spooking Al’s horses. The children scrambled out of rig while Al tried to calm the terrified animals, but they were frantic every time the machine swooped and roared overhead.
Al’s younger brother, William Owen, brought a wife and five children to homestead when he came with his father and brothers in 1885. Sometime around the turn of the century, William built the beautiful rock home that still stands at the corner of Sunnyside and Ammon Roads. His son, Horace, writes that William purchased one of the first phonographs in the area, referring to it as a “Victor Talking Machine” and describing the label: a dog looking into the horn with the caption reading, “His Master’s Voice.”
The third Owen boy, Joseph Henry, is said to be the locomotive engineer who drove Engine #119, called the “Old Iron Horse” across the newly constructed Snake River railroad bridge in Eagle Rock, the first train over the river on June 1, 1879.
Another early settler who later became one of Bonneville County’s first officials, John Empey claimed land in 1886, northwest of Iona. He was too young to file a homestead at the time, but his 21-year-old friend filed on 160 acres, and John paid him for half the claim. All summer John cut logs for a cabin, but progress was slow and the cabin didn’t get up that year. Deciding to head back to Utah to claim his childhood sweetheart, John married Almira Ceretta Norton, and brought her to live in Idaho. The groom was 19, and the bride just 17.
When they arrived at their claim in the spring, they had no place to live until John could finish the cabin. So they turned their wagon upside-down, propped it up, and Almira had her first home. Snug in the cabin a year later, she gave birth to twins who did not survive, and a year after that had a son, the first of their twelve children to live to maturity. In 1888 they sold out and settled on property bordered by present-day Sunnyside and Crowley Roads. Their second child, James Shadrack Empey, was known as the first white male child born in Ammon.
Like Albert Owen, John Empey planted grain, fruit, and potatoes in his newly-plowed prairie farm. He hauled his first crop of spuds by wagon on a three-day trip to Caribou Mountain, selling to workers and Chinese immigrants employed at the gold mines there.
John told a story about his first automobile purchase. “I bought a Loushire, and the man explained how to start it, the use of the brakes, how to drive it and everything. When I got home I realized he had forgotten to show me how to shut it off, so I just drove it around and around the woodpile until it ran out of gas.”
For thirteen years John served as superintendent for the Eagle Rock and Willow Creek canals, and later as the Upper Snake River watermaster for seven years. John had some interesting tales to tell about disputes over water rights. One time he looked down the barrels of nineteen guns and lived to tell about it after settling the argument to most everyone’s satisfaction.
In 1911 John Empey was serving as a Bingham County commissioner when the state realigned boundaries and Bonneville County was created. Governor Hawley asked John Empey to be one of the first commissioners in the new county along with W. D. Huffaker and R. L. Bybee. They met on February 11, 1911 in the Earl Building in Idaho Falls to organize the county.
Like many early Bonneville County settlers, the Owen brothers along with John Empey were truly local folk heroes. Their hardscrabble families, who lived under wagon boxes and in crude cabins with dirt roofs and floors, carved civilization out of a wilderness and left a heritage of courage, integrity, and fortitude for all to admire.
Portions of this story have been excerpted from the author’s book, Unsung Heroes and Settlers of Bonneville County, Idaho. This article is eleventh in a series honoring Bonneville County’s 100th anniversary on February 7, 2011. In celebration, the Bonneville County Heritage Association sponsors continuing programs highlighting the founding of local communities, businesses, and services every second Tuesday and fourth Thursday of each month throughout 2011. The anniversary celebration will culminate in November with a weekend extravaganza under the direction of Ann Rydalch. See www.bonnevilleheritage.org for details.