Heritage Court 2007
Ora Lee Disbennett
And in summer she’d ride her horse into town from the family farm, which sits 1 and one-half miles south of Bellevue.
“In those days Highway 75 was US 93—it was a national highway,” she recalls. “But we probably knew every car that went up the road—there were probably 10 cars a day in those days.”
Those days were 60, 70 years ago.
Today Disbennett is 76 and about to be inducted into the 2007 Blaine County Historical Museum’s Heritage Court, which honors women who helped make the Wood River Valley what it is today.
Disbennett’s family was among the early pioneers in the valley…
Petra Morrison
Petra Morrison hasn’t strayed far from the spot she was born.
Maybe a hundred yards up the hill or so—enough, at least, that the trees are just budding out when things are blooming down below.
“This has always been a special spot for me,” said Morrison, looking out over the balcony of her home in Weyyakin toward the barn her family used to own. “As a youngster, I’d come up here and look at all the wildflowers. Once in awhile I would run into a sagehen or deer. I could hike all over the place from here.”
Morrison was crowned Sunday as part of the fourth annual Blaine County Heritage Court, a reward for her part in contributing to the life of the valley these past 82 years.
Rose Mallory
When Rose Mallory thumbs through her family scrapbook, she thumbs through memories of walking along Hailey’s Main Street with sheepherders, using sticks to keep the sheep off residents’ lawns.
She recalls accompanying her father into the hills to take produce and paychecks to the Basque sheepherders.
And she remembers the sheepherders trailing into her family’s boarding house each winter, eager for a hot bath, followed up with cigars and café royale and a game of mus–a Basque game of cards and bluffing.
Mallory, now 80, was born in the Basque town of Ybaranguelua near what is now the Basque resort town of Bilbao…