Letter to the Editor: is progress a bad word?

By Sun Advocate

As I read Frances Cunningham’s letter to the editor (Sept. 24) concerning the Bruno Farm property my mind went back to the days following my return to Carbon County in 1990. For 30 years we, my wife and I, carried in our minds the images of Carbon County as we remembered it. I had lived in eight different communities in Carbon County. My wife was from Hiawatha. We found us a fine home in the Castle Gate sub-division in the mouth of Spring Canyon. We were retired and looked forward to visiting our “home places.”
With excited anticipation we first visited Hiawatha, or, what was left of Hiawatha. Next, I suggested to my wife and children that we should then go up to my old home towns of Spring Canyon and Standardville. They were totally gone. Castle Gate was also no more. Sunnydale was where we first made our home when we married in 1955. It too was not recognizable. We couldn’t even find where our house had stood.
Ah progress! What it can do. Yet, as I think on it, perhaps the word “progress” isn’t what really happened. I wonder.
Well now for the past 12 years I have been trying to make a collection of the pictures of the coal camps as I knew them. I have been fairly successful. Each time someone allows me to make a copy of an old picture I think to myself, how I wish I could have that picture talk and tell me of the people that lived within it. So, with that thought in mind I have been trying to convince those who lived in and around those places to write some of their memories concerning their days as a coal camp person. I have not been too successful in that endeavor, but have had some thoughtful and concerned folks do so. As a result the Carbon County Historical Society has published four journals with those memoirs we have received. This has been an effort to partially keep alive those coal camps that provided an environment so unique to Carbon County.
Now, I guess I will have to hurry and take pictures of the Bruno Farm before it too will go the way of progress, oh, I wasn’t going to use that word. I’m not sure, though, what word I can use. Perhaps desecration might be strong enough to match my feelings of what our county has lost by the thoughtless razing of our heritage.
It is my sincere hope that UDOT will be able to build the overpass without taking away another of our few remaining historical sites. I know that I, for one, will encourage them to do so.