Page 160
BACKNEXT
Aerial view looking east at the Silent City of Rocks, (October, 1990). The fins of the Almo Granite pluton (intruded about 30 million years ago) trend north-northwest. In the distance is the old stage station west of Almo at the entrance to the City of Rocks.
View of rhyolite lava on the summit of the Cotterel Mountains east of Albion, looking east across the Raft River Valley to the snow-covered northern Sublett Range (March, 1995).
Foliated quartzite of Oakley stone, Albion Range. Rock is Late Proterozoic schistose Clark's Basin Quartzite, (September, 1979).
Sublett Range
The Sublett Range west of Rockland Valley is composed of upper Paleozoic sedimentary rocks, mainly limestone, from which many fossil corals and other invertebrates can be collected. Because the bedrock is limestone, surface water is sparse, since water sinks into underground channels.

Cotterel and the Jim Sage Mountains
The Jim Sage mountains west of Raft River Valley contain several tilted Miocene rhyolite lava flows and ash-flow tuffs. They are best known for rattlesnakes and obsidian.

Settlement of the Cassia County Area
The first settlers to Cassia County area were Mormon emigrants from northwestern Utah, who came in the early 1870s. Beecherville (now Elba, named after the Mediterranean island where Napoleon had been in exile) was founded on upper Cassia Creek, eighteen miles east of Oakley, in 1873. Almo was founded in 1878 and named Alamo, after the great cottonwoods that grew there. The name became shortened to Almo.

Mary Jane Gorringe Tolman, quoted in Arrington (1979, p. 38-39) speaks of Mormon cooperative farming in the Oakley area in the 1880s.

"In the spring we were very desirous of planting some crop, but could see no way out only to put our trust in the One who rules over us. At morning and evening in our prayers, we petitioned our Father in Heaven to help us...While my husband was in Oakley, a Brother William Whittle came to him and said, "Brother Tolman, do you need a little money to help you put your crop in? If so, I have $10 I can loan you till fall." A brother C.H. Carlson came to him and said, "I understand you have no team. You can take my team to put your crop in." My husband came home rejoicing. We felt that God had been good to us."

Albion
Albion, at the foot of the range that bears its name, was called Marsh Valley and used by cattlemen in the 1860s. It was settled in 1869 and was county seat of Cassia County from 1879 to 1919.

In the 1890s, J.E. Miller, one of Albion's Pioneers, gave 5 acres of land for a Normal School. In 1893, Idaho's second legislature established 2 normal schools, one of which was at Albion. The college was closed in a cost-cutting move in 1952. Its fine buildings stand today, in a state of purgatory between destruction and restoration.
top