How one couple made it their mission to save a Spring Glen cemetery

Every grave, a family’s memories
His journey started 135 years ago.
He was 35 years old and a Mormon convert.
Thomas William Haycock, Sr. and his eldest son, William, boarded a steam ship, The Nevada, on June 20, 1883.
The pair was traveling from the family home in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England. Thomas was leaving his home country for good after getting into trouble for poaching a rabbit. He and a brother also lost their jobs after paying respect to a notorious labor figure.
Thomas’ 33-year-old wife Mary Ann, and the couple’s four other children would follow a year later.
The family would reunite at Winter Quarters, a Carbon County coal mining community just west of present-day Scofield.
Thomas’ is an immigrant’s tale.
He worked as a tracklayer in the mines. Later he was a road engineer for the State of Utah.
Around 1890, the family secured a 160-acre tract of land in present-day Spring Glen. They homesteaded the land, living in a tent while building a log cabin home on a knoll at the property’s western boundary.
That cabin stands tall today, tucked off a residential street named for the family who settled the area so many years ago.
That little wood cabin has a new roof, doors, windows and chinking to seal it up from the elements.
Saved for future generations to appreciate. the rebirth of the Haycock family home is thanks to another set of Haycocks, Barry and Bunny, of South Jordan.
These Haycocks—Barry, 76, is the great-grandson of Thomas and Mary Ann—started their own special journey eight years ago.
The couple made it their mission, a labor of love really, to restore the Haycock Cemetery, which contains not only the remains of Thomas and Mary Ann, but also of more than 50 others, many of them babies who died close to birth, an enduring reminder of how fragile pioneer life was a century ago.
There aren’t just Haycocks buried there either. Last names engraved on headstones reflect a kaleidoscope of early local families—Jones, Buckley, Stowell and more.
And the renovated cabin today sits atop a rise overlooking most of the graves.
Eight years ago the cabin was only four walls, an unfinished project rotting in a neighbor’s yard. The graves  were overrun with weeds; some headstones were even scorched from people burning trash and debris in the empty lot the cemetery had become.
It was so bad that relatives of Barry and Bunny’s who traveled to the area in 2010 from out of state told the couple the graveyard was gone—as if it were swallowed up by the earth and disappeared.
That’s when Barry and Bunny, who just turned 74, sprang into action. Along with family, friends, neighbors and volunteers, Barry and Bunny did something remarkable—they turned a forgotten patch of Spring Glen scrub brush into a hidden historical gem for generations to enjoy potentially far into the future.
“We feel like the Lord wanted this to happen,” Bunny says.
It’s hard to dispute.
The first objective was to clear the property of all the weeds. That took a while. Next was to identify all the graves, many of which didn’t even have headstones. That also took quite some time. And questions still remain about who all is buried there.
Lucky for future historians, Bunny included as part of her mission, the collection of every scrap of information she could get her hands on—old newspaper clippings, birth certificates, death certificates, property records and more—about anyone and everyone she could identify as having been interred there.
As she was pulling all that information together, her band of merry volunteers continued weeding the land, putting down thick sheets of material over bare ground in preparation for spreading 40 tons of gravel throughout the little patch of land; the gravel was a donation from a local construction company.
Ditches to collect rain water—this remarkably prescient work was completed just before a major flood struck the area in 2014—and a low pipe and chain fence to keep people from bringing their vehicles onto the property were finished.
The graves were cleaned, the headstones carefully preserved and beautifully adorned with flowers. One family donated a marble bench for visitors to sit on. A foot path was built from the road through the cemetery.
And, finally, rescued from oblivion nearby, the remnants of the cabin were brought over, and though they sat awhile, it was just long enough for a Boy Scout looking for his Eagle Scout project to come by and help put it back together.
Bunny and Barry recalled all their hard work and the help of others during their annual breakfast on May 26.
Bunny announced the work nearly finished—the final step was to dedicate the cabin.
Tears in her eyes, she declared, “I really loved this project.”
On hand were family members of some of the folks buried in Haycock Cemetery. Barry and Bunny’s son Bryan and his family, joined Cayden Keith Jensen, the soon-to-be-Eagle Scout and his family, including the boy’s grandfather Robert Olson, who fabricated the doors and installed the windows in the refurbished log cabin. Jason Covili, whose great-grandfather inherited the land from his father, Thomas, was there with his family.
Covili shared with the assembled group that he was not technically owner of the property—he and an uncle placed the land’s deed in a family nonprofit foundation. He also informed the group that he was moving forward with closing the cemetery to future burials—something Barry and Bunny knew needed to be done, but had no way of doing it themselves since they didn’t own the property.
“We are closing it to future burials, not to the public. We always want the public to feel welcome to come in and look at the graves and come in the cabin,” Bunny says.
After breakfast at Main Street Grill in Price, the group headed toward the cemetery.
The trip there is eerie in some ways—Haycock Lane runs west to east from 2000 West, which itself runs through Spring Glen, parallel with Spring Glen Road. Homes in varying conditions dot the sides of the lane, interrupted at times by rolling hills, alfalfa fields and horse pastures. A bevy of normal looking single-family homes sit just across the street from the cemetery, which itself is surrounded by farmland.
Far from the weeds and scorched earth that marred the cemetery a decade ago, the gravelled landscape today is pristine, almost sublime for what it means sitting there amongst the living.
The cabin has a new roof, thanks to Jensen and fellow scouts. Inside is a picture of Thomas and Mary Ann, along with another of them and their family. A map of all the gravesites identified so far also sits inside.
The sounds of the wind, muffled neighbors and a solemn whine from a killdeer who lays its eggs in the cemetery each year are all that seem to break the silence.
“This is sacred ground,” Covili says quietly.
Bryan Haycock leads the group in the dedication (see below). A relief of sorts invades the cabin, the guests meander away amongst the gravestones, perhaps to rest a bit on the marble bench before heading home.
“Our work is basically finished,” Bunny says. “Eight years we’ve been working.”
The result is a grand trip through history,
The names and dates on the glistening stones mean different things to different people—the babies are the most tragic, the first one buried there in 1892; a woman killed in a car accident in 1999 is also buried there, among those who died in almost every decade from the 1890s into the 1970s.
The dates tell of good long lives, and awfully short ones, and every kind in between.
Lying there, more exquisitely than ever, are the memories of families here and gone.