Dave and Ida lived just a few miles apart and it was not difficult to become
acquainted. Dave and the boys (his brothers and Chris Oliverson) attended
weekend dances at the neighboring towns. Dancing was one of the most
popular activities for the young people and dances were always well attended.

Buggy, horseback and even bicycles took the boys to the dances. Their father 
had tried to teach them to sing, but unfortunately that excellent Welsh trait was
 lost on all three of them.  In place of singing, their father turned to the next best 
thing, dramatics and dancing.  All three of the Nash brothers were good dancers.  
Dave attended the dances in an "old claw-hammer coat" (Enos' term for the
long, split tail).  He could waltz, do a jig or Virginia Reel with the best.  Years
later he would take his own family to dances, or do a jig for them.  He also had 
a musical talent that most have forgotten.  He played the jew's harp.
It was at such a dance at  Coveville that Dave met Ida and began their
courtship.  From the beginning Ida was devoted to Dave, always wanting
to please him; and in return he always brought a piece of candy or gum
for her.  They courted for at least three years, for Ida was young.  Even
then no one seemed to question the fact that they would eventually marry.
They were finally married on that beautiful spring day, I May 1901: their
wedding photo reveals a very handsome couple.
The day after they were married they moved to Franklin where Dave
ran the blacksmith shop with Ike.  They rented two rooms in the old L.L.
Hatch rock home, not far from the northeast corner of the park.  Ariel
was born in that home a year after they were married.  Dave's sister,
Estelle, was with Ida when Ariel was born and she relates this incident.
Dave was in the room when their baby was born, but he got sick and had
to run outside where he vomited.  Later, when he returned to the room,
Ida put her arms around him and said, "Oh Dave.  You've suffered more
than I have."
They lived in the old rock house for two years, then they bought a
stucco home not too far away (one-half block north of northeast corner of
the park).  They lived there until 1914.   Four children were born in that
home - Vendla in 1904, Paul in 1906, Uless in 1909, and Hazel in 1912.
It was during these years that Dave was deciding whether he wanted
to be a blacksmith or a farmer.  Andrew and Ike were apparently trying
to make the same decision.  Andrew had tried blacksmithing Preston, Soda
Springs, Pocatello and Rexburg, but was now ready to try farming again.
Ike had received a good education and had worked in the blacksmith shop
and on the Nashville farm.  For the first eight years of Dave's marriage
he worked primarily with Ike in the blacksmith shop and on the farm.
Their father died in 1907, and in the fall of 1908, Andrew returned
to Franklin from Rexburg and the three of them began working together
as partners.  The following spring they added to their holdings by leasing
one section of land from the State of Idaho.  By road this land was ap-
proximately ten miles across the valley to the west, at a place called
Roosevelt, located between the river and the railroad tracks.  Eventually
it would  be  called  Linrose.
They also gained title to the range land between Dayton and the top
of the first range of hills to the west.  The  boundary to the range was
north of Dayton approximately two miles, and the southern boundary went
I  south at least two miles south of Dayton.  It was sold in the late 1920's
or early 1930's.
For a while the three brothers jointly operated both farms and the
blacksmith shop.  At some point, during the next four years Andrew be-
came discouraged with the Roosevelt farming prospects and he separated
from Ike and Dave. Andrew took the Nashville farm and Ike and Dave
took the Roosevelt farm. It was during this time Andrew's wife, Oveda,
died - December 1909 - leaving him with six children.  In March 1911
he married Veroka Gill, a widow with two children of her own.  A few
years after he took the Nashville farm he turned it over to his son and
moved to Preston where he went into partnership with Theo Petterborg.
Their "Petterborg-Nash Chevrolet" was operated until Andrew's death in
1943.
One major event took place before Dave and Ida moved their young
family to the Roosevelt farm.  On 26 October 1911, Dave left Franklin
to fulfill a mission in Australia.  He left Ida with four children between
ages nine and three, and five months pregnant with their fifth child. Hazel.
It was very difficult for Dave to go, and for Ida to let him go.   Never-
the less they both wished it.  She has written, "When my husband got his
call to go on a mission I knew that my prayers had been answered.  I had
prayed many times that he would go on a mission although it was a great
sacrifice.  It was a wonderful experience for both of us."
Dave was gone twenty-six months, completing an honorable and suc-
cessful mission.  He spent the entire time in the state of Queensland, in
towns with names like Brisbane, Toowoomba, Woollangabba, Rockhamp-
ton,and Moorooka. Most of a missionary's time in those years was spent
in taking care of the Saints and making the branches of the Church func-
tion, not nearly as much proselyting work as missionaries now do.
During most of the last year there, Dave lived in  Woollangabba, a
Brisbane suburb, where he served as Conference President over all the
Saints in Queensland. (I lived in Brisbane and immediate vicinity in 1949,
during the fist six months of my missionary days.  I lived in the same
church he lived in, and met two families who still remembered Dave after
thirty-five years).
Dave's mission years were busy years caring for Saints and for the
affairs of the Church; but for Ida, "Dear Wife" she is called in Dave's
mission journal, and the young family in Franklin, the two years were
extremely difficult and trying. Ike and Andrew watched over Ida and her
children, but it was still difficult.  Dave had borrowed money to finance
his mission as well as the needs of the family.
Five young children inevitably get contagious diseases, and it seems
they contracted every possible disease during those two years.  In those
days when someone had a contagious disease, the entire household was
quarantined.  Signs were posted and you could not leave the immediate
confines.  Even the letters they posted were fumigated.  If they ran short
of groceries, they would put a list in the mailbox, hoping a neighbor would
pick it up and oblige them.  Dr. States, the family doctor, spent many
hours with the five young Nash children when they were ill, but as long
as Dave was in Australia he refused payment.
Colds and sore throats were always a problem, and pneumonia was
always a threat. They did not have access to the drugs and tablet we have
now, but they did have access to some remedies we have forgotten. When
the kids got chest colds, Ida plastered their chests with snuff and lard.
When they got bad sore throats, she wrapped a piece of gauze around her
finger, soaked it with turpentine, and swabbed their throats; or if that did
not work, she used a piece of bacon sprinkled with pepper and covered
with coal oil. Sage tea found multiple uses.
Dave returned to Franklin just before Christmas, 1913.  "It was the
happiest Christmas we ever had."  Dave had never seen Hazel, Uless was
just turning five and would have to become acquainted with his father all
over again, Paul was seven and he could remember his father.  Vendla
was nearly ten and Ariel was nearly twelve. Their memories of those two
years are strongest.  The following spring, 1914, they all began a new
venture when they sold the Franklin home, partly to pay the mission ex-
pense and partly to spend full time at the Roosevelt farm.  They moved
across the valley to an isolated, dusty, dry, windy flat, with no conven-
iences and no immediate 'neighbors.  It was also three miles from any
kind of store.

THE ROOSEVELT FARM

The Roosevelt farm was first leased in 1909, then purchased from the
State of Idaho in 1912.  It was known as the "school section," which
means it was the last numbered section in that township (36 sections).
The profits from the sale of this section were to be used to build a public
school.  The boundaries were one mile apart.  The northeast boundary
was at the crossroads just under the hill from Laron Bright's home, now
Linrose Road and 800 South. The southeast boundary is the corner where
Uless lived, one mile south. The western boundaries were a short distance
west of the railroad tracks.
The entire west side of the valley had very little water for irrigation,
and dry farming meant very little financial return.  In 1900 the farmers
from Clifton, Dayton and Weston, all just west of Roosevelt, formed the
Oneida Irrigation District and proposed a complicated scheme which
would bring water from Mink Creek, several miles to the northeast, to the
dry, western flats.  There was much enthusiasm for the scheme and as a
result most of the land was bought in anticipation of a good water supply.
Unfortunately the plans were too complex and by 1910 the first water
was barely reaching the Clifton farms, ten miles north. The farmers in-
curred an increasingly high indebtedness to pay for the water system and
it drove a good many  of them out of the valley.   The Roosevelt farmers
were quite discouraged.
The lease, and later the title, that the three Nash brothers obtained was
exceptional, partly because it was the school section and partly because
of Ike's influence.  Ike was well-known in Boise.  Later, he served as
State Land Commissioner, living there for fourteen years.  When the land
was first leased (established in Ike's history of his brother Andrew) they
were aware of the water problem and they had written in the lease that
the State would pay all the water taxes on the section until water was
actually delivered.  This meant that for nearly eight years the State paid
taxes while they patiently waited for the water.  Inasmuch as they were
the only landowners with such an agreement it is understandable why
some of the neighbors bore a trace of resentment when the subject of
those early years was raised.
Most of the land was first broken up and plowed during the four
summers before Dave went to Australia. The men would leave Franklin
and spend a week or so at the farm, go to Franklin for a weekend and
then return to the farm.  At first they built a bower of willows and sage-
brush, which served as headquarters for the working men.  It was located
under the hill directly west of the homesite and next to the little stream
which provided water for the bowery camp.  North of the bower a few
hundred yards was a small reservoir which had been built by some Weston
men, and between the bower and the reservoir they cut wild hay for their
horses.
The farm work took place on top of the hill from the bowery, and
what a sight it must have been.  The entire flat was covered thickly with
gigantic sagebrush.  Everyone has memories of the high sage they had to
cut down.  Enos Holden put it best, "That sage was so damned big that
you could just see my curly head sticking up above the sage when I was
on my long-legged horse."  From what Ariel, Vendla, Paul, Uless, Tom
Smith, and Laura Atkinson had to say, he was entirely correct. You could
park a sheepcamp under it, you could get lost in it, and it undoubtedly
inspired much cussing because it all had to be grubbed out.
At times there were as many as twenty men working to clear it off.
Ike has written that they cleared 400 acres during the first summer.  They
hitched three horses to each end of a long iron rail and dragged it through
the sage to knock it down.    That was the first step.  Then they had to
use an axe, a shovel, or whatever they had, to get the roots out.  It was
a discouraging task, but the sight of such high sage suggested good soil
underneath.  It was.
Sometime prior to 1914 they built a small cabin under the hill for the
men to live in. Later it was moved to the top of the hill, but considerably
south of the site picked for their permanent buildings.  Still later it was
moved to Ariel's farm. The foundations for the old cabin are still at the
top of the hill (1968).  If you dig around a bit, directly west of the old
Reuben Taylor home, you might find a memento.
When the work was hardest Ida would drive to the cabin with the
children and cook for the men. Dave's sisters all remember the old sage-
brush bowery, and his oldest three children remember the sheepcamp and
cabin when they were under the hill.  They also remember the numerous
hobos who came down the railroad track for a meal, and the violent thun-
der storm which killed Billy Moore, one of the hired hands.
For those of you who have never see the farm, it is situated on flat
land.  Toward the west end the land drops off into a small valley approxi-
mately one quarter of a mile from rim to rim and 120 feet in depth. The
little stream runs through the middle of the little valley and the railroad
track is just under the west rim.
The tempo changed considerably as soon as Dave returned from Aus-
tralia.  By then the farm was a full-time operation for Dave and Ike and
it was decided that Dave should move his family to the flat to operate it.
The farm belonged to Ike and Dave jointly, but Ike worked for the State
and spent most of the next few years in Boise while Dave took respon-
sibility for the farm.   They drew up a partnership agreement that divided
all costs and profits equally between the two.   Part of the cost was a
monthly wage of $80 paid to Dave. By the 1920's this amount was raised
to $150 per month.
They also kept their livestock within the partnership agreement, except
for a few horses.   Dave kept Nett and Bally, and Ike kept Maud, Baby,
Colts and Buster. Ike owned some additional property west of the railroad
tracks and the partnership also operated it.
The agreement established a method of dividing the farm if they ever
wished it, even to establishing a method of choosing neutral judges to
perform the division if Dave and Ike could not agree on the division (each
was to choose a man and these two would choose a third, and these three
would divide everything).  Fortunately Dave and Ike worked well enough
together that they did not need to invoke that provision when they even-
tually divided. (I have a copy of the 1914 partnership agreement).
As soon as the decision to move was reached they hired a carpenter,
Fifield from Weston, to build a home for Dave and Ida at the top of the
hill.   When school dismissed in June  1914, they moved into their new
house.
If it was Dave's responsibility to create a farm out of a dry sagebrush
flat, then it was Ida's responsibility to create a home in which they could
be content. She had not wanted to make the move to the edge of nowhere,
but once there she spent countless hours making the home and yard a
beautiful, pleasant place.  She found hours, between caring for five chil-
dren, with two more to come,  and cooking for huge numbers of field
hands.
Dave and Ida planted shade trees all around the home, boxelders, pop-
lars, and cottonwoods.   They also planted a large fruit orchard directly
east of the house, and Ida kept all those trees alive by laboriously carrying
water to them in a bucket.  How tiring, and how many hundreds of trips
she had to make.  The water came from a well Dave had dug next to the
house.  It was fifty-two feet deep and provided the best drinking water
on the flat.  It also doubled as a cooler for milk and butter.
The old barn came next, and it came all the way from Franklin where
it  had  been  used  as  a  woolen  factory  by  Edmund  Buckley.    They  tore  it
down board by board and rebuilt it, complete with wooden pegs for nails.
They placed it at the edge of the hill, just a few yards northeast of their
new home. In the loft they put a tank large enough to hold at least 4,000
gallons of water.  Now the barn is gone, burned to the ground.
The water came from under the hill somewhere near the old bowery.
They used an ingenious apparatus called a water ram to get the water to
the top of the hill.  It used no electricity, but it was based on the principle
of utilizing the ramming force created by falling water, to push additional
water up the hill.  A 120-foot-long pipe, known as the drive pipe, was
filled with water.  As it filled the water pressure built up, valves opened
and water was forced into the uphill pipe.  When the ram pipe filled and
the pressure slacked, valves automatically closed to stop the water in the
uphill pipe from coming down again, and the water was drained out of
the ramp pipe by another valve.  Then the slow process was repeated again
and again.
It sounds  complicated,  but  it was  really  very  simple.    In  the process
it raised  the  water  120  feet  in  height  through  765  feet   of three-inch  pipe
to the top of the hill.   In later years they hooked the car to the ram in
some manner to speed the rather slow process. Also in later years, before
electricity came to the flat, Dave bought a generator for the house to take
the place of lamps and lanterns.  (I have the blueprints for the water ram.
I recall seeing the old pipes at the creek when I was a boy, but I never
understood what they were for).
In 1909 the brothers planted wheat in the land they had cleared.  For
the next few dry years that was all they could grow.  The more land they
cleared the more hired men it took to harvest the grain.  By 1914 and
1915 they needed upwards of twenty men to complete the harvest.  Old
pictures show several teams of horses pulling the old grain-headers which
cut the grain and dumped it by belt into the huge header-wagons.  The
cut grain was then hauled away and put into stacks.
In the 1920's Ike and Dave cooperated with some of the neighbors,
Bill Heusser and John Hobbs, and bought a horse-powered threshing ma-
chine.  It worked by hitching several teams of horses to a large windlass,
and by driving them around the windlass they provided the power to thresh
the grain.  Ariel remembers how tiring and dirty it was to spend hours
and hours hauling the separated straw away from the machine.
Bill Hulse and his wife, Lottie, moved to the farm the same spring
Dave and Ida built their house. When the big house was built they moved
the cabin to the top of the hill for the Hulse's.  Bill worked for Dave and
Ike for more than fourteen years and Lottie helped Ida cook for the hired
men.  Charles and Hazel Gill lived there and also helped, and by the
1920's Arthur and Einore Moser were helping. Ida, with the various help-
ers, worked innumerable hours cooking over a wood stove, mixing bread
in a tub, curing hams, making head cheese or mixing her own lye soap.
There were always so many hired men to feed they simply washed the
dishes and placed them back on the table for the next meal.  Both Enos
Holden and Bill Hulse mention the huge meals that were always served.
Ida worked hard for the men and took pride in her accomplishment,
but that first summer if 1914 she would not wait on the men at the tables.
She worked at all the other tasks, but not before the men. That was the
summer before Grant was born. Ida always kept a kind of proud spirit
and temper in her home that was noticeable. Her refusal to wait on the
men that summer was part of it. Her insistence on shade trees and fruit
trees, from the beginning, is another part of it.  Several people have men-
tioned the charm and friendliness of Ida's home, always five or six vases
of fresh flowers, always good food, and always an open hospitality even
for hired  men.
Ida made extra butter for sale in Weston or Preston, but the only horse
she could use for the buggy drive to town during the busy season was an
old horse with a huge club foot.  Ida never drove "Bally" into town be-
cause of his misshapen foot.  She tied him up on the edge of town then
carried her butter to the store and the provisions back, rather than be em-
barrassed by the old horse.  Bill Hulse remembers Ida of those years as,
"...a fine woman.  None better.   She helped anyone."
Bill also remembers the night Grant was born in November 1914.  No
doctors were available so Dave went to Preston for help and Bill took the
buggy up Weston Creek for Mrs. Fredrickson who acted as a mid-wife.
As Bill remembers, he made it back in time. As a matter of fact, Bill
seems to have been quite devoted to Dave and Ida. Paul remembers that
whenever Dave or Ida went anywhere with the horse and buggy Bill waited
up for them to  take care of the horse upon their return.  Bill was still
extremely fond of them in 1966 when we talked to him.
From the time Dave and Ida moved to the farm they were also in the
livestock business.  They started off with pigs.  They had pigs, pigs, and
more pigs, as many as six hundred. The pigs ran free in the grain stubble
or in the sagebrush, usually living in the huge stacks of straw, but some-
times someone had to herd them.  Paul and Uless remember doing this.
They built several straw-roofed farrowing pens for them under the hill.
When they were ready for sale they drove the pigs to the Weston railroad,
approximately three miles away (have you ever tried driving a herd of
pigs?).  By 1918 or 1919 they went out of the pig business; but before
they did it seems that Dave had developed a mighty pig call, and others
had developed a healthy respect for some of the biggest boar pigs.  One
weighed nearly 800 pounds.
By 1917 the farm was undergoing a significant change as the grain
fields were turned into sugar beet fields, which coincidentally brought the
end of the free-roaming pig business.  The Oneida Irrigation Company
finally got water to the flat and they began to grow row-crops.   Sugar
beets were the first row crops planted, then potatoes.
Dave was not the first to grow sugar beets. H.R. Bingham remembers
hauling beets to Cornish before water came, but before long the Nash's
were raising more beets than anyone in the valley. They hauled the beets
by wagon to the Thornton station just northwest of the Nash reservoir.
That trip involved the delicate task of moving a heavily load beet wagon
down the hill at the north end of the reservoir, then up the other side,
pulled by two teams of horses.
Sugar beet growing also meant the necessity of large crews of men.
Much of the key harvest work came during cold and wet fall weather and
this necessitated building better housing for these crews.   Sometime in
this early sugarbeet period they built a frame house just south of Ida's
home, for the hired hands.  Around the same time they built a house
immediately north of the home for Ike and his wife, Amanda.
The frame house which was built for beet workers eventually provided
a different kind of dividend.  It provided a home for all the boys when
they married, usually one couple in the west end and another couple in
the east end. Uless lived there for just a few months, but the other brothers
lived there in turn for several years.   Eventually a basement was built
under it.  The entire house accidentally burned in the late 1940's.  When
they were first married, Uless and Paul, then later LaMar, also lived in
with Dave and Ida for a few months until houses became available for
them.
One house was not enough for the hired hands, so Dave brought a
one-room house all the way from the Nashville homestead. It ended up
on the southwest corner of the farm, and if its walls had voices it too
would have a story to tell.  Some Hindus lived in it first.  They were
directly from India and worked for Dave by contracting the hand labor
on the beets.  Their customs were strange. They had weird pipes, a weird
ceremony which included killing a yearling bull that had no blemishes, a
prayer closet in the house, and a penchant for wild fights.  Dave had to
face four of them at once when he became angry over some sloppy irri-
gation practices, and they became belligerent.  He had to use a club to
bluff them.  One of the Hindus, John Kahn, lived a winter with Dave and
Ida.
After the Hindus left, some Mexicans lived in the corner-house for
a year. Then, in November 1929, recently-married Uless and Sabina
moved there. By then. Bill Hulse had built a leanto on it, and two addi-
tional rooms were added.  Uless and Sabina lived in it until 1948 when
they moved one mile north to the old Berrett farm. Later, the corner-house
was lived in by a countless number of Navaho Indians, complete with
their own religious ceremonies, some lasting all night.
In the 1970's new owners razed the house, barn, sheds, trees and gar-
dens that Uless and Sabina built.  Not even a stump is left to indicate
that the corner was once my home.
It is unlikely that present and future generations can ever appreciate
the finer points of growing sugar beets.  Nowadays a tractor plants six
rows of seed at a time. The seed is even a special seed so that too many
beets will not grow in the same place.  A tractor cultivates the beets
through the summer and in the fall a few tractors and trucks and one huge
harvesting machine completes the work in record time.
The labor is not necessarily any easier now, but it certainly takes a lot
less of it, and it is obviously different from the Twenties and Thirties, and
even the early Forties. Then the land was plowed, harrowed and planted
by horse-drawn machine and usually by the boys.  Ariel recalls that the
field was so long, paralleling the irrigation canal that angled through the
arm, that he could plow no more than two rounds in the morning and
two in the afternoon.
The harrowing process was equally long and tedious. Dave made a
little two-wheel cart for Ariel to ride in.   It followed directly behind the
harrows and was hitched to the front end of the harrows with a goose-neck
tongue.   This enabled Ariel to ride rather than walk as he did the har-
rowing.
All this work was tiring, including the difficult task of planting straight
beet rows, and then "thinning the beets with a hoe that had a very short
handle.  The end result was a person all bent over, sometimes on his
knees, crawling up a row of beets, whacking at them with one hand on
the short-handled hoe and using the free hand to pick out any "double
beets" or weeds that the hoe missed.  The novelty of the task wears off
in a short time and even a few hours of it leave a memory that is not
likely to be erased.   How glorious it was when I came down with red
measles during one spring beet-thinning time.
Summer work with sugar beets was not particularly difficult, unless
you count the first few summers when Dave and the boys were first learn-
ing how to irrigate.  (Dave built his first ditches with a spirit-level, and
they were just as accurate as if done surveyor's tools.)
Harvest time could be much more difficult. There was always a threat
of bad weather from an early winter. Because of this it was necessary to
keep large numbers of beet workers until the fields were cleared.  Once
again, just as with the earlier grain crews, Ida cooked for the beet workers.
By now she was cooking three meals per day, baking bread twice a day;
and housework centered so much around the meals.  Wanda remembers
helping Ida cook for twenty-seven men the second year she was married.
Dave grew sugar beets for nearly twenty years before the first tractor
came to the farm, thus all the labor was by virtue of horsepower or man-
power.  At harvest time the mature beets were loosened from the soil by
horse-drawn machinery and then the beet workers would "top" the beets
with an odd-looking knife. It was a heavy knife similar to a long butcher
knife, with a cloth strap on the handle which was wrapped around the
worker's wrist for added support.  The other end of the knife had a long,
curved hook, perhaps two-three inches long.