The Kansans Come to Blackfoot and Rockford
The Shawver legacy of Rockford
8/24/20267 min read
Della and Marc Shawver
The Kansas borders in 1909 were being pushed to the Rocky Mountains, so Fred T. Hines, from Moline, came to Blackfoot from with a carload of belongings in early January of 1910. His eye was on running the Oak Cafe in the Blenkle building at the corner of Bridge and Taylor streets. He opened two weeks later but must have wearied of the business quickly, as within a month he relinquished his cafe rights. He traded them to his partner for interest in the nearby New Cash Grocery but kept control of the rooming house upstairs at the Oak. Six months later he'd sold his Grocery and its stock and was off on a new endeavor, farming land on the almost constructed Highline Canal, a recently added offshoot pulling water from the Peoples Canal, northwest of Moreland. A Methodist, he collected enough members to start a church in Moreland which opened in May 1912. He would earn enough trust in the Blackfoot community to become the deputy sheriff and jailer.
Two of Hines acquaintances in Sedan, Kansas—just twenty miles from Moline—Marcus Shawver and his cousin William McCarty, felt the state's population burgeoning, too. Farming wasn't working out there, and they felt they had to do something different. Real estate men and the railroad were advertising free land in Idaho—the promoters, called 'locators', charged for their services so the land wasn't really 'free', however. Shawver andl McCarty decided to go West to see the lay of the land and left from Sedan on the train in October of 1910 and headed for Blackfoot.
The Aberdeen Branch railroad—splitting from the Mackay Branch west of Moreland and heading southwest with the intent to get to American Falls (it never reached there)—had built a siding at the 'Burrell Basin' in 1909. That basin (west of the current Rockford townsite), for a short time, held American Falls Canal water and one year provided supplemental water for the Peoples Canal. The siding was built to accommodate the farmers already in nearby Thomas, a mile and a half east, a village already settled for a decade. Once the American Falls Canal, to the west of the already built Peoples Canal, was finishing its construction between Springfield and American Falls, the homesteader population quickly trickled in to take advantage of the soon-irrigable land.
The advertised land McCarty and Shawver saw upon their arrival was disappointing, all of it being west of the canal and unreachable with water. Intent to not go home empty-handed they continued to look for other land. Shawver found 160 acres east of canal, sixty of it developed, and McCarty bought a piece west of the railroad tracks, an acreage that bordered the same road as Shawver's property (now Scott Road). Shawver had to borrow five hundred dollars from his cousin to purchase his ground. They returned to Kansas as landowners out west.
Before their expected return trip, the Shawver family visited relatives in Oklahoma they might never see again, traveling via horse and buggy through the Miller Brothers '101 Ranch', a 110,000 acre empire with 25,000 cattle, on their way there. They reported seeing 'nothing but cows as far as you can see'. Not long after that, they gathered their possessions—four cows, four horses, some farm machinery and their household goods—and loaded them on one railroad car. The two men, McCarty and Shawver rode with the stock while Shawver's wife Della and their two children, Edwena and four year old Kenneth, rode in the coach. The livestock had to be loaded and reloaded several times along the route to be fed and watered.
They arrived at what would be Rockford on December 15, drove their cows and horses to the new place just a quarter mile from the siding. At their property's two room frame house and bunkhouse snow had drifted as high as the eaves of the house. Della looked at the two room shanty and thought they'd 'landed in hell'. She sat down and cried. Marcus had to borrow a stove pipe from neighbor Louis Barnes to get a fire going to warm the house. The prior tenant, Lars Peterson, had moved a day prior, and by one report was too lazy to chop wood so burned the fence posts and had even started burning the chairs of the house.
There were no barns or corral so Shawver spent the remaining winter months building them, and once spring arrived he began clearing brush, hauling rocks and digging ditches—a job that would continue for some years. During that time, area men worked on the Peoples Canal to make it deeper, wider, and strengthen its banks with the use of horse and scraper. Income his first few years was an improvement of the past in Kansas, 1910-1914 being boom agricultural years nationwide.
The land near the townsite siding Shawver and McCarty landed at, which was first called New Thomas and is sometimes shown as such on early maps, had been purchased in 1909 from P.B. Dance and J.D. Murdock. A June 1910 newspaper story claims the siding was named Rockford after the Illinois investors in the American Falls Canal. In November 1911, the land had been platted for a hundred business and residential lots which were auctioned off on the day before Thanksgiving. Forty-three lots were sold at $25-$50 apiece.
The first business built was William Stephens' 1914 store, which burned down two years later. In 1915, Tom Hall built a pool hall and rented the front to Mr. Knowles to use as a barbershop. The basement would be used for a dance hall, and as Bingham County prohibited alcohol at that time one might presume that illegal drink may have been distributed there from time to time. In 1923 Harry Kipp built a blacksmith shop in the town, two years after John and son Leonard Josephson built a spud cellar. The Josephsons and Tom Williams operated a packing business there for eight years before selling to Shawver, who would sell the enterprise to C.R. England in 1953. By 1955 it was torn down to make room for Highway 39.
Hans Peterson, who already owned a store in Riverside, soon built the Rockford Mercantile in the teens and Idaho Lumber opened up a lumberyard close by not long after. The school was a two room building, built the same year the Shawvers arrived—when oldest child Kenneth was four years old. Kenneth later reflected upon herding area stockmen's cows, receiving 25 cents a head per week for his work. The land was unfenced sagebrush and Kenneth rode an old work horse to herd them from place to place. "I saved my quarters in a cup," he wrote. The cattle under his charge got in a neighbor's crop one day and he had to pay damages, which 'took all the quarters in the cup'.
Marc started raising certified seed potatoes in 1914 and son Kenneth was enlisted to pull and remove diseased plants from the fields. The business grew, as the railroad said they would buy all the potatoes he could raise to feed their construction crews. Once word of those transactions reached the mining companies in Montana and Wyoming, business expanded fast.
Getting potatoes from the field to the train was no easy task. A team and wagon could pull only thirty sacks through the often muddy fields and the roads to the sidings weren't much easier to traverse. In 1916, Marc began working with 'track buyers', who contracted to pick up potatoes at the Aberdeen Branch sidings, and he bought and sorted local farmers' crops to fulfill the orders. Since bad weather, particularly deeply cold spells, prevented transporting potatoes to the siding, farmers started building cellars and warehouses along the tracks up and down the valley.
At the Josephson warehouse in Rockford that Shawver bought, which could house eighty carloads (a car could carry 360 hundredweight), they sorted, weighed and packed the potatoes in one hundred pound burlap sacks. Culls and small potatoes were returned to the farmers. Shawver's business burgeoning, he built another warehouse in Blackfoot (it would eventually become Wada Farms' packing house) with Bob Garnand, who moved to Twin Falls a couple years later and turned his share of the partnership over to L.E. Stephens. The packing house was equipped with automatic sorters and washers and in 1936 would add air conditioning, which helped eliminate heat problems, shrinkage and rot. Shawver later would add to his Rockford and Blackfoot holdings, purchasing a Pingree cellar/warehouse which he would ironically sell to Ernest Josephson, John's other son, in 1955.
Marc Shawver had other irons in the fire. He bought and sold wheat, too, which at that time was mostly shipped in 140 pound bags. In 1922, with other Rockford investors, he bought a mine in Mackay that was unprofitable and he later bought in on an Afton, Wyoming wildcat oil well that drilled 2600 feet before breaking—the drill is still there, presumably.
The Shawvers were using 12 head of horses to farm 400 acres on different plots in 1930, about the same time electricity reached Rockford. That not being enough work, Marc partnered with Joe Maxwell to purchase a threshing machine together in the 1920s. They did custom work, the crew requiring twenty men and eight teams and wagons. Della and their daughters cooked for the crew when it was nearby: platters of meat or fried chicken, bowls of mashed potatoes and vegetables just out of the garden, home baked bread, and pie or cake for dessert. At other farms the farmers' wives fed the men, each wife trying to outdo the others with the spread she provided.
Maxwell and Shawver would extend their partnership to raise alfalfa seed on the Reservation. They used forty mules on that endeavor and it took all day to move equipment from Rockford to their leased acreage. After ten years, when along with a once-in-twenty-year bumper crop (by Shawver's appraisal) the thresher burned mid-harvest (he ran to town and bought a new one), Shawver walked away like a wise gambler, figuring he'd never replicate that success.
He had a stroke in 1943 that severely curtailed his activity, but son Kenneth had been helping since 1922 (at age sixteen) so the business transitioned to him smoothly. Kenneth two sons, Robert and Kenneth, who would continue farming in the area and their sons would carry on the tradition into the present, carrying on the Shawver legacy.
Much of the information in this post was garnered from Kenneth Shawver's and Afton Shawver's biographies on Ancestry.com
