Scouts making mark at cemetery

SOUTH JORDAN — When Brad Jencks was 6, he discovered a certain excitement in learning about his ancestors while doing genealogy research with his mother.

He also discovered something else: His great-great grandparents, Solomon John and Sarah Genevieve Copenhaver, were buried in a cemetery that was owned and operated by Jordan School District.

Seven years later, these two lessons have stuck with him, and as the 13-year-old South Jordan Boy Scout works toward the rank of Eagle Scout, they are lessons that have turned him into a Utah historian of sorts.

"I thought, 'This is cool,' " Jencks said of his first experience with genealogy. "I'll get their (his ancestors') information. It felt good inside to get that information. I wanted to help other people find their ancestors' information."

And so he has led his friends in Troop 123 — Briton Bradford, 13, Scott Bay, 12, Jonathan Vincent, 13, and Cameron Ledbetter, 12, all of South Jordan — in a months-long project to compile century-old burial information at the Bingham City Cemetery, just outside the township of Copperton in unincorporated Salt Lake County at the end of the Old Bingham Highway.

The Scouts have also spent their summer and fall repairing dilapidated and vandalized headstones and learning about the diverse community that was Bingham City a mining town at the foot of Kennecott's Bingham Copper Mine that disincorporated in 1971 and has since been buried by mining operations.

Jencks and his troop, along with Jencks' father and troop leader, Paul Jencks, and his mother, Lori Jencks, have gone from playing with lizards and snakes in the overgrown graveyard to shivering and watching deer feeding among the headstones, but they continue to work to bring the history of the early 20th century into the 21st century.

When Bingham City disincorporated, Utah law passed the cemetery's responsibility on to the nearest governmental agency — Jordan School District. Lori Jencks said the district has done its best to keep the cemetery up to snuff, but in the end district officials are in the business of education, not cemetery maintenance.

And so hundreds of headstones have become hard to read with time, crosses have been broken by vandals with baseball bats, and several graves are just raised mounds of dirt with no identification whatsoever.

In all, there are 1,336 graves at Bingham City Cemetery, Brad Jencks said. He and his team of Scouts have photographed about 900 of the headstones with digital cameras.