Owyhee Avalanche Feature

Jordan Valley author lives, records history
From the March 25, 2009 issue of The Owyhee Avalanche

Hazel Danner Fretwell-Johnson’s family has been around just about as long as anyone in the Jordan Valley area. In addition to being a resident, she’s a historian and author, and kindly shared some of her own history with The Owyhee Avalanche. Her life, like her books, brings together the threads of the town’s long tale.
Fretwell-Johnson was born in Jordan Valley in 1920, on March 17.
“Spoiled the big Irish St. Patrick’s celebration for a lot of people,” she wrote.
She was born in the house that belonged to her grandparents, John and Sovia Danner. John, she related, was the postmaster at the time. The locally famous Dr. W.W. Jones attended her birth — the man for whom the Arock Elementary School was later named.
Jones is an excellent example of the people and stories Fretwell-Johnson collects and relates. The physician — who once swam the Owyhee River while ice-chunks floated past in order to attend a South Mountain boy — served in France in World War I and studied at the Mayo Clinic, but is best known in Jordan Valley for delivering three generations of babies — and for never losing a mother in childbirth, she said.
Sovia was a registered nurse, Fretwell-Johnson reports, taught by Jones.
Fretwell-Johnson’s own parents were Robert and Ruth Robinson Danner. Ruth’s father, she remembers, was the village blacksmith.
At age 2, the family moved to Danner, where Robert was postmaster — at the post office named after his father. Two years later, the family moved again, this time to Arock. Fretwell-Johnson’s father ran a grocery store that served the farmers and ranchers of the newly settled Jordan Valley Irrigation District.
Her brother Donald was born in Jordan Valley, brother Harold was born during the years at Danner.
She spent nine years of school at the Arock schoolhouse, and then finished her secondary education at Ontario High School. She went on to attend Gooding College, Oregon State College at Corvallis and the College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls.
She married Orville Fretwell in 1942, and took up ranching in Arock. She had three children with Orville: Glenn, Rebecca and Robert. Fretwell died in 1970. Hazel remarried in 1980, to Irvan Johnson, who she had known from her college days, and settled with him in Twin Falls for more than 26 years. He passed away in 2006.
Two years ago, she found herself back in Jordan Valley, where her two sons live — and her nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

On writing
Fretwell-Johnson has written four books, on, or connected with, Jordan Valley and the lives of those who settled there.
“I feel it is very important that we preserve our heritage,” she said. “When I was younger, I talked with many older people about the past area happenings.” As the years pass, and many of the older generation pass with them, her collections are sometimes the only record remaining.
Those oral histories, and research in the Twin Falls Library security history room for documented events, were the resources for her books, the most recent of which, The Best of Jordan Valley, is just being released by Caxton Printers.
Her first book, Behind the Hills, was, she reports, “mostly fiction”. It was published in 1949. It’s long out of print, and the only copies at Amazon.com are listed as high as $70. It was published by the Christopher Publishing House of Boston, and is the story of Fretwell’s early married life in Arock. While fictional, the book is, she said, heavily sprinkled with facts.
Fretwell-Johnson went on a 41-year hiatus following the publication of her first book, and it wasn’t until 1990 that her next, In Times Past, a fully documented history, was published. The book offers a look at the stories and lives of the Lower Jordan Creek communities: Arock, Danner and Rome.
As to why the four-decade vacation from writing?
“I was busy,” Fretwell-Johnson said. “I reared my children and everybody else’s, and did a lot of painting.” Plus, of course, dealing with all the myriad things that need doing on a ranch or in a home.
They came to Jordan was published in 1995, and details the settlement of the region as well as collecting more tales.
Caxton Press is publishing her newest project, The Best of Jordan Valley. The book, all 385 pages of it in a 9 by 6 format, starts off with the earliest settlement itself — with the tribes and the first European to look into the valley. It will cover the communities and settlements along the Jordan Creek drainage: Silver City, Jordan Valley, on down to Rome. Fretwell has included the history of the Basque settlers as well, and the things they brought to the region, whether sheepherding, the many miners that came to Silver City, dry goods or stonemasonry. Early Basque settlers’ handiwork can still be seen in Jordan Valley’s Catholic Church and the Jordan Valley ION Museum building — formerly the Elorriaga boarding house.
Fretwell-Johnson is a painter as well, preferring oils and currently enjoying floral painting. Flowers offer her an easier subject, as she suffers from macular degeneration, tough she doesn’t seem too worried about that.
“They say people paint best a little blurry,” she said.

Keeping busy
“I am a steady worker at the Jordan Valley ION Heritage Museum and member of the board,” she reports. She’s also kept busy by traveling and has seen a fair portion of the world. Her wanderings have taken her to all of Japan and Okinawa, Australia, Indonesia, Hawaii, England, Scotland and Wales. She has been to Alaska three times, and to most of Western Canada and to Mexico several times.
After the Second World War, she helped extend a hand across the Pacific.
“I brought five Japanese young men over to teach them to raise cattle, under a 4-H program to mend family-to-family relationship with Japan after the war. Each stayed two years. They were ‘My Boys’.”
She keeps her hand in locally, as well.
“I have been a member of the Arock Grange for 76 years, and the only member to receive the national Degree of Ceres. I was Master at one time,” she reported.
“I write a weekly column to the Malheur County newspaper, The Enterprise, for the news in this end of the county.”
It would be hard to find someone who knew the area better, or had greater affection for it.

-MML