ANNOUNCER: Major funding for Idaho Experience provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, Making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson, and Judy and Steve Meyer, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

SKIP KUBAL, NEW PLYMOUTH RESIDENT: The horseshoe is always something special.

We took pride in it, yes.

DAN SHOEMAKER, BISON RANCHER: It was designed that way from the start, that the guys who built this, they come out of Chicago, put the horseshoe down and built the whole town around it.

BARBARA PERRY BAUER, HISTORIAN: I don't know that there are any others in the world.

It's their claim to fame.

It was a utopian community where people would be able to live close together, could depend on one another.

JEFF KUBAL, NEW PLYMOUTH RESIDENT: You could go to town and, you know, ride your bicycle anywhere you wanted.

Adults kept an eye on you and all the kids in town.

Mom being a beautician, she would know before I got home that I did something wrong.

CHASE SHOEMAKER, AGRICULTURE TEACHER: We have water when we need it, all of the time, and we have lots of it.

That's what built this place.

Without irrigation, we would be a piece of desert right here.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: At first glance, New Plymouth could be any small rural town.

On the street, at the school, in the park, at the local farms, it sure looks like any small town.

But from the air, New Plymouth reveals its unique place in Idaho and American agriculture history.

BAUER: Supposedly it is the only horseshoe shaped community in the United States, which is definitely something that New Plymouth is very proud of.

And I don't know that there are any others in the world.

NARRATOR: This distinctive shape dates to the very beginning of the New Plymouth Colony in the 1890s, when irrigation advocates in Chicago set out to build a community where farmers could work their land while living close to their neighbors.

BAUER: It was a utopian community where people would be able to live close together, could depend on one another, have a blank slate to build a community, to build the place that they wanted to live.

NARRATOR: The town's horseshoe includes boulevards on either side of a U-shaped park one mile long.

The boulevards separate the inner and outer rows of houses.

Farm land radiates out from the horseshoe, and businesses are inside the ring.

BAUER: It was definitely not a typical shape by any means, but it served the purpose that they wanted, where they were able to have their community buildings in the center.

You would have your neighbors close together on the inside of the U.

Then again, you have those larger properties on the outside and you would be able to share your horses, your implements, whatever.

So you had some cooperation between the neighbors.

NARRATOR: Founder William Smythe believed that homesteaders had been isolated and adrift on large 160-acre farms, left to fend for themselves miles from any neighbor.

New Plymouth's plan would help farmers succeed on smaller, irrigated farms, within easy reach of church, school and neighbors.

VOICE ACTOR: These colonists can unite the advantages of town life with the independence which can only be had by tilling the soil.

The Idaho Statesman, 1898.

NARRATOR: Jeff Kubal remembers that close-knit sense of community in New Plymouth in the 1960s and 70s.

JEFF KUBAL: You could go to town and, you know, ride your bicycle anywhere you wanted.

Adults kept an eye on you and all the kids in town and you didn't have to worry about anything.

NARRATOR: Sue Bischoff grew up in New Plymouth and recalls an idyllic childhood.

SUE BISCHOFF, NEW PLYMOUTH NATIVE: It was a fun place to grow up.

And our parents never worried about us back then.

You know, it was a safe place to be.

The canals were our swimming hole.

We played there for many a hour.

And then when we got tired, we would just float all the way down through town and to my grandparents' house and get out.

My brother came home with this little animal.

And my dad came home for lunch and he goes, what is in there?

Well, he opened the box and it starts hissing and spitting.

And he said, you guys need to take that right back where you got it, because he thought it was a badger.

And I said, Dad, that's not a badger.

It's a raccoon.

And I said, he's probably hungry.

So we got raw hamburger and lettuce out of the refrigerator and dropped it in the box.

And he just went crazy, just eating it.

And as soon as he got through eating, he started purring like a kitten.

And so I reached down and picked him up and he was ours for the next eight years.

NARRATOR: Today, New Plymouth has about 1,400 people.

The small farms have been sold or consolidated.

The main highway, trains and buses don't come through any more.

Most of the beloved waterwheels are worn out, and many newcomers don't know the town's history.

But the high school mascot is still the Pilgrims, the corner store is called the Pilgrim Market, and 19th century homes still stand along the horseshoe.

The sense of small-town community remains.

CHASE SHOEMAKER: It's a great place.

Everybody knows each other.

Small town.

We're all good friends.

You know, like you go to a basketball game, football game, and the school is jam-packed full of people.

I mean, you might not have a kid playing, but you still come to basketball games.

DAVID SOTUTU, NEW PLYMOUTH SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT: You get that sense of the importance of the people in the community that you know.

We all know each other, and we support each other.

ARMORAL TUTTLE, LONG-TIME RESIDENT: I've always felt that there's a feeling of volunteering and of sharing in this town more than I hear other people commenting on other towns.

If someone has a fire many times they come out of it afterwards with almost more than they had before because people are so willing to share and help them.

NARRATOR: Armoral Tuttle died in 1998, but she embodied New Plymouth's volunteer spirit.

She and her husband operated the blacksmith shop, and for 60 years she was the town librarian.

Now named for her, the library houses a collection of New Plymouth history compiled by local residents.

One cherished book was written by the 1952 junior English class at New Plymouth High School, under the guidance of their teacher, Claire Goldsmith.

The students advertised on radio that they were gathering pioneer stories, and people shared their remembrances.

VOICE ACTOR: Mabel Pomeroy started off to school in winter with baked potatoes in each pocket.

She kept her hands warms on these.

At school the potatoes were reheated for lunch.

This was the hot lunch program in its beginning.

NARRATOR: With no sidewalks or paved streets, mud was a problem.

Many homes had a tub of water at the front door.

VOICE ACTOR: In the year of 1896, the tub was placed there to wash the mud off the boots after a person had been walking through the quagmire.

When anyone was visiting, it was the fashion to carry his shoes in his pocket to wear when the boots were removed at the door.

NARRATOR: The town's first club was the Puritan Society, organized in 1897 by the wife of colony company president Benjamin Shawhan.

Every woman in New Plymouth was invited to join.

They held ice cream socials and watermelon feeds to buy a piano for the town hall and, later, a flagpole for the school grounds on Main Street.

BAUER: They planted all of the trees along the boulevard and they had to haul the water from the river to keep the trees watered.

NARRATOR: In 1990, unofficial town historian Janie Fitzsimons compiled a New Plymouth history slide show on the 100th anniversary of Idaho statehood.

Her research is collected in a binder still kept in the library.

SUE BISCHOFF, NEW PLYMOUTH NATIVE: She's 94 and she doesn't see real well and she doesn't hear real well anymore, but she still loves history, she still talks to people.

And every time someone passes away, she makes sure I print out the obituary to go in the obituary book.

So, yeah, she is, she's quite a historian.

NARRATOR: Janie's daughter, Sue Bischoff, has a copy of her mother's history presentation.

BISCHOFF: It was said that you could drive down the road and identify the farmer who stacked the hay by the shape of his stack.

The Kennedy brothers took great pride in their huge, straight hay stacks.

Roads were dusty in the summer and sticky mud in the winter.

This view of Main Street was from a postcard stamped 1909.

A mile outside of town was a brick yard.

There was a high mixture of sand in the clay used for the bricks, which made them crumble after a few years of weathering.

Thus, most of the buildings built at that time are no longer standing.

A clause in the charter prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages to any colonizer, with the penalty of forfeiting his land if caught.

This stayed in effect for 50 years.

Mercantile and hardware stores came and went in the early days.

A picture of Mr. Lynch, one of the first colonizers.

His wife was one of the two ladies elected to come out from Chicago to find a place to put the irrigation project into reality.

New Plymouth is one of the most aerial-photographed towns in Idaho.

It has been on the regular air route and many a pilot has found his spot on the map by sighting the unique shape of the town from the air.

Ralph Tuttle took this picture from a plane in the early 1940s.

Inside the horseshoe we see an old shot of the Palace Hotel.

Many an old-timer can recall a hearty chicken dinner eaten here after Sunday church.

After a fire that completely destroyed the junior and senior high school on Dec. 18, 1984, the town really pulled together.

Churches and organizations loaned their facilities to allow the school to continue.

School buses delivered the students from one end of town to the other.

It was quite a campus.

NARRATOR: School still draws the community together.

That was proven again in spring 2020, when Covid-19 prompted the town to come up with a creative way to celebrate its graduating seniors in the middle of a pandemic.

SOTUTU: Before they drove in to accept their diplomas, they did a parade.

They came up and down the boulevard and the support was amazing.

Everybody came out.

The graduates were throwing candy.

We had all kinds of vehicles.

We didn't allow tractors.

That was a decision that was made.

But we did have a dump truck.

Several different cars, trucks with couches in the back.

It was it was a lot of fun and a lot of support.

A lot of great support that wouldn't have happened if we didn't have that great sense of teamwork to pull that off.

[MUSIC] DAN HULL, HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: I give you the graduating class of 2020.

Let's give them a big round of applause.

[SOUNDS OF CHEERING] NARRATOR: This Idaho utopia actually was born in Chicago, and got its name from a New Englander - writer, minister and reformer Edward Everett Hale, who saw it as a home to a generation of new pilgrims.

Idealistic, planned communities were common in the late 1800s.

Founder William Smythe borrowed ideas from colonies in Greeley, Colorado, and Mormon settlements in Utah to create his dream of a prosperous, irrigated Eden populated by "proprietors of the soil."

In May 1895, a delegation of five men and two women from the National Irrigation Congress came to Idaho to check the water, land and roads.

They liked what they saw.

Within a year, the Plymouth Colony Company had 325 acres and its first 35 families, mostly from Chicago.

Among those very first settlers were two single women.

BAUER: Jenny Stovel and Emma Vesey were among some of the first colonists.

They had 10 acres that they cultivated.

They had alfalfa.

They planted vegetables.

They had fruit trees.

And they not only ran their acreage, they also operated a store and the post office.

VOICE ACTOR: I am delighted with the success of two young ladies of Chicago, who have demonstrated that bloomers are as well adapted to plowing as to bicycling.

William Smythe, 1898.

BAUER: The newspaper identified them as girl bachelors.

They've done really well with their wheat and they've done really well with their orchards.

So you had these young women who were also coming out and looking for opportunities for themselves.

And they were not the only women to do that in the history of homesteading in the West.

NARRATOR: Colonists bought shares in the colony company and 20 acres of farm land at 20 dollars an acre.

That entitled them to a one-acre home site on the horseshoe, known as the "home acre."

The first settlers had enough water to get their orchards planted, but irrigation canals took 20 arduous years to finish.

Benjamin Shawhan, a New York banker who'd come to Idaho in 1892, sold the Plymouth Colony much of its land and became president of the colony company.

Civil engineer D.W. Ross designed the town's shape - which he described as a boot heel.

When colonists drew lots to pick their land, Dr. C.M.

McBride got first choice.

By 1897, Dr. McBride and his wife Annetta had planted 5,210 trees on their 40 acres - mostly apples but also peaches, prunes, pears and cherries.

The McBrides had New Plymouth's first commercial crop and shipped their first rail car of pears in 1902.

One of the first buildings was the Village Hall, which served as town hall, school building, dance hall and church for the first residents.

BAUER: It was a hard time.

You had to bring your own lamp into an unplastered building and you had to cut and haul your own sagebrush to burn for services.

So it was a mix of Methodists and Presbyterians who formed their first church.

It was a community effort with everything that they did.

NARRATOR: The first New Plymouth pilgrims were people of faith, but the colony was organized to promote farming, not religion.

But temperance was a moral principle all the pilgrims practiced.

Original land deeds prohibited alcohol, and owners had to forfeit their land to the colony if they ever sold liquor.

VOICE ACTOR: We do not only intend to raise the finest fruit which will give value to the Plymouth brand, but as well bring up a crop of young men in whom new Plymouth can take pride.

New Plymouth bylaws.

NARRATOR: The person most responsible for New Plymouth was William Smythe, a Nebraska newspaper editor and irrigation evangelist.

He organized the first National Irrigation Congress in 1891.

VOICE ACTOR: The arid region will become a series of vast villages embowered in orchards.

Its people will be alike free from the unsocial gloom of large farms and the unwholesome influences of great cities.

They will be the happiest people on earth.

The Chicago Inter Ocean.

BAUER: He saw the drought in Nebraska and the surrounding region, and what it did to the small farmer.

He really took to heart that irrigation could benefit farmers.

And he had the idea then I think about these smaller farm acres that would be to the advantage of a farmer.

He wasn't a farmer himself.

But as a reporter, a newspaper editor, he certainly could see what was going on in the community around him and the heartache and hardship that people faced.

NARRATOR: Smythe moved to California and created several more irrigated farming "colonies" there.

He never lived in New Plymouth, but he visited in 1898 and pronounced the experiment a success.

[SOUNDS OF WATER] Water drew the town's first settlers in the 1890s, it powered the community's industry and economy - and sometimes, it even provided entertainment.

JEFF KUBAL: When you got older, basically the kids in the summertime lived in the canals.

Down by the fairgrounds there was a bridge there and everybody would jump off the bridge.

We would go up as far as the water wheels and float through town and get out and start all over again.

Every day, it happened, every day.

But those times are past now.

NARRATOR: Adults, too, made their own entertainment.

People gathered in town on Saturdays, to shop, visit and dance in the Pioneer Building.

Before the first theater opened in 1937, they watched films shown on the outside walls of the Idaho Department Store.

SKIP KUBAL: The people around came to town every Saturday night to get their groceries and they parked uptown.

They all visited and visited and got their groceries, and it was packed.

I mean, everybody came.

Every Saturday night.

Yes.

NARRATOR: Louise Kubal, known all her life as "Skip," grew up on a New Plymouth farm.

SKIP KUBAL: I was the cow-milker.

And my sister was the house person and I was the outside person and my brother is four years younger, so it took him a while to catch up.

I milked cows till I was, well, when I was a senior, finally dad let my brother trade every other day milking.

NARRATOR: Farm life was spare.

Skip's grandmother, for instance, never had an indoor bathroom and always practiced the frugality of pioneer life.

SKIP KUBAL: All of her books that came in the mail and catalogs, she'd stack them out in the outhouse and use them, or not, whatever, I guess.

When you have that many kids, you don't buy extra things like toilet paper.

I don't think she ever had any.

So it's just the way it was.

NARRATOR: Skip's grandfather opened the town meat market in 1904.

Each January he hired five men to cut 15 wagon loads of ice from the ice pond, and layer it with sawdust in the icehouse.

It took two sides of beef, one veal, two pigs and one lamb to feed a town of 100 people each week.

SKIP KUBAL: His name was J.F.

LaCrone.

He made his own pickles and wienies and everything in the meat market.

And every kid in town could come, I think on a Wednesday, and get a free wienie.

So there was a line of kids up there that would get their wienie.

NARRATOR: Dan Shoemaker also grew up on a New Plymouth farm, and still lives on the family farm property.

DAN SHOEMAKER: It was a dairy at the time.

We milked about 40 head, which isn't a lot nowadays.

But back then, you know, it was a steady income and a lot of work.

Every day getting up and milking and coming home and milking, yep.

I started changing those sprinklers when I was 13 years old.

And I still change them to this day.

I'll change the sprinklers as long as I can because I get out in the buffalo pasture, I get to see the fences, I get to see the buffalo and it's good exercise.

NARRATOR: Dan's father farmed in Nebraska before he came to Idaho, and now Dan's grandchildren live on the farm.

DAN SHOEMAKER: Farming goes in my family for generations.

I hope it stays in the future, because as you sell your family farm, it'd be tough to get back in it again.

So I'm hoping that one of my grandkids farms.

We can encourage 'em.

And I don't care if it's my grandson or my granddaughter.

My son is the ag teacher down here in New Plymouth.

And I actually went to school in the same classroom that he teaches in now.

That's where I learned to weld.

NARRATOR: Dan's son, Chase Shoemaker, teaches agriculture and welding at New Plymouth High School, and is building up the Shoemaker Bison business.

CHASE SHOEMAKER: We've built an empire.

We came from a whole lot of nothing.

But we've got something big now, I think, and it's great.

NARRATOR: In the early 1980s, poor beef prices prompted Dan to sell his cows and take a gamble on raising bison.

DAN SHOEMAKER: It was kind of a novelty.

It was interesting, it was a learning experience.

I discovered that canals don't stop buffalo from crossing.

You can use a canal as a fence for beef cows, because they'll stop.

So I go up there, my buffalo swim the canal and they're eating on the side.

And then I go out there and chase them back over.

So I discovered that canal water does not, is not a fence for buffalo.

NARRATOR: Fruit and fruit-packing was New Plymouth's main business until the 1930s.

But in the Depression, fruit couldn't be sold.

Trees were left unpicked, then pulled out, the land cleared for other crops and for beef and dairy cattle.

Dan Shoemaker remembers the smudge pots that burned in those orchard days, creating a blanket of smoke that helped protect fruit trees from damaging cold.

DAN SHOEMAKER: When I was a kid, we'd go to school and on a cold morning, the smudge spots were going and the whole valley would be black and the orchards were all going.

But as time grew on, the orchards started being taken out, turning into farm ground, but it's taken years.

I mean, there's just very, very few orchards here anymore.

NARRATOR: Today the Shoemaker family farms a combined 300 acres, growing a specialized farm product on the same land and with the same water that drew the first orchardists in the 1890s.

DAN SHOEMAKER: If New Plymouth farmers did not have irrigation, you would have dry dirt.

Irrigation is everything.

CHASE SHOEMAKER: We have the best water, in my opinion, in the country here, because of our great watershed and our canal system.

We have water when we need it, all of the time, and we have lots of it.

That's what built this place.

Without irrigation, we would be a piece of desert right here.

Those guys back in the day they did that.

I appreciate what they did and all that hard work to make the system we have today.

[MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Major funding for Idaho Experience provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, Making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson, and Judy and Steve Meyer, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.