Aspen Hollow Farm

Elmer Jay Hartvigen’s paternal grandfather Joakim Ferdinand Hartvigsen (JF) was 3 when he came from Norway. His grandmother Ellen Eilertson was 21 when she emigrated from Norway. They met in the Marsh Valley area near Downey Idaho where their families settled. The Hartvigsen family farmed the whole south end of the valley. Jay’s Grandfather, an uncle and a cousin owned 2500 to 3000 acres. They farmed mainly wheat and a little barley. Jay was born in Salt Lake City, just a few months before the stock market crash in October of 1929. During the difficult years of the depression his family moved from Salt Lake City back to Downey near the family farms. He lived there from the 1st grade to the 9th grades. Jay spent most of his youth helping his grandpa farm. He spent eight working summers farming, starting when he was 12 years old. He began driving the combine tractor when he was very young. In the mid 1940’s Jays family moved to Kaysville, Utah where he graduated from Davis High School in 1947.

Jay was called on an LDS mission to serve in his family’s ancestral home of Norway. He served in Norway for 3 years. After returning home from his mission, Jay was drafted into the Army during the Korean conflict. On Christmas Eve in 1952 Jay was in bayonet training, charging dummies and “yelling like a wild man” when he got the news that because of his foreign language experience, he was assigned to an intelligence unit and spent the rest of his time in the service at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. “The irony of spending Christmas Eve on the bayoneted range was that after basic training, I never saw my rifle again.
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After his military service, Jay returned home to Utah and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah. Jay married Janice Rae Beesley in June on 1956. In 1969 an opportunity arose to purchase some property adjacent to the family farms near Downey, Idaho. Jay and his uncle Reed Hartvigsen bought the Aspen Hollow farm from the Lundgren family (a Swedish immigrant family.) Jay paid $5,500 for his share of the 415 acres. 242 of those acres were cultivated and used for farming. Jay (who worked for the Federal Government’s Department of Labor) and Janice lived in Bountiful, Utah. They had 5 children at the time and an established life near family in Bountiful. It wasn’t practical to uproot and move the family to the farm, but beginning in 1970 Jay spent many summers on the farm with his 3 sons farming the fields. In the late 1970’s Jay bought out Reed’s ownership in the farm and Reed purchased some neighboring property.

Aspen Hollow remained a producing grain farm for 15 years, growing wheat and barley. In the early 80’s, because Jay’s wife Janice was struggling with a relapse of breast cancer, Jay leased the fields to his uncle, Lester Hartvigsen, to farm as part of Lester’s farming operations. Janice passed away in February of 1983. Now as a single parent, with 2 of their 6 children still at home. Jay placed Aspen Hollow in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP.) The farm was eligible for the program because of it’s location bordering the Caribou National Forest. The farm has been in the CRP for 25 years. This program gave Jay an annual stipend to pull the farm out of production and keep it a more natural state.

When Jay bought the farm there was an old cabin that the Lungdren family built. The cabin had a one small bedroom, a kitchen and a little bathroom. This was the only residence on the farm property. Jay and his family lived full time in Bountiful, Utah. During the summer farming season, Jay and his sons would stay in this small cabin during week and then return home to Bountiful for the weekend. Because of the location and proximity to the national forest, hunters and outdoorsmen would often travel through the farm to get to the National Forrest, despite “private property” and “no trespassing” signs. In the summer of 1987, Lester and Jay went to Aspen Hollow to check on the crops. While they was there, an old truck pulling a horse trailer drove up the hill above the cabin. The truck’s engine killed. It had been raining and the road was muddy. The brakes couldn’t hold the weight of the truck and the trailer. The truck and trailer slipped off the muddy road and knocked the old cabin off its foundation. The cabin was unsafe and uninhabitable. Later the Bannock county sheriff’s department used the old cabin to run training exercises in. They shot the house up and shot tear gas into the cabin. When they were done, Jay bulldozed the cabin.

In the fall of 1993, Jay had a manufactured home place on the property. He chose a site next to a hillside above the old cabin. This site offered magnificent views of the valley below and the beautiful hills above. This was Jay’s primary residence until August of 1998 when he re-married Elizabeth Condie. At that time Jay and Elizabeth lived primarily in Elizabeth’s home in Downey and occasionally stayed at the home at Aspen Hollow. Because the farm is so far off the electrical grid, there are no county utility services available. The farm is completely self sustaining using septic tanks, propane and creating it’s own electricity through a combination of wind turbine, solar panels, a hydro-electricity and a gasoline generator as a back up source.

The old out buildings (a barn, chicken coops, sheds etc) that were on the property when Jay purchased the farm (barn chicken coop etc) were never used other than storage. But these buildings provide an interesting and rustic visual reminder of the homesteading origins of the farm. In the late 1970’s Jay had 3 large grain bins built on the property to store the grain.

In 1996 the family built a pavilion in the spot of the old cabin. This pavilion has a fireplace, BBQ, cooking and food preparation areas and a sink. This pavilion is now the center of large recreation groups that gather at Aspen Hollow. It has several picnic tables that can accommodate a big group. Because the farm is no longer in crop production, the property is used mostly for recreation by Jay’s children and their families. Word soon spread of the beautiful location and great terrain for horseback, ATV and snowmobile riding and other groups enjoyed coming for family reunions, church and social gatherings. In the mid 2000, another building was built near the pavilion that housed two functioning bathrooms. This made the property even more useful for groups using the farm for recreation.