CAMPBELLVILLE
About the same time as Rockford's establishment, Campbellville came into being--likely known as Liberty now, it was three and a half miles southwest of Rockford on the railroad line. The Wheeler brothers had 200 acres of wheat on the north end of the area, bachelor Philip Keller was getting his homestead in order, Joe Sova, who had been working on the Highline portion of the Peoples Canal, was fencing his half-section, brothers Edward and William Weiland were getting hitched, W.H. Keller--who was teaching at Flagtown, a desert community west of Moreland--was settling in with forty acres that included five of flax. Campbellville considered itself an "educated" community, having not just Keller as a resident but N.P. Guyer (teacher at Thomas) and Louis Wells (a teacher at the school two miles west of Thomas).
J.A. Campbell and sons were setting out three thousand fence posts to enclose three fields of oats, barley, wheat and flax.Campbellville sought their own school in 1912, which they acquired not long after, holding a meeting of "The Desert Farmers' Society of Equity" in the Tompkins' schoolhouse in February 1914, though enough members for a quorum weren't present to vote on important issues. The winter wheat looked bad the next spring, requiring replanting, and there was a rabbit drive on Sunday and a literary society meeting the next Friday in February to show a little diversity. Campbellville and Flagtown were able to "secede" from the Moreland school district in 1916, but the schoolhouses were up for sale not many years afterward.
And Campbellville disappeared.
You can read more of the towns created at that time in The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, an account of the century long extension of a frontier from the Snake River Plain's edges into its core. Purchase it locally at Kesler's Market and The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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