Family saves old Bingham Cemetery

BINGHAM — For the past seven years, members of the Jencks family — Paul, Lori, Brad, Tiffany and Stephanie — have volunteered thousands of hours to give an extreme makeover to a place that is home to nearly 2,000 people.

And do you know how many residents have tapped them on the shoulder and said thanks?

Well, so far, none — thankfully.

The home they rescued is the Bingham City Cemetery, located on the high plains of the Salt Lake Valley just east of the little town of Copperton and the towering Kennecott Copper Mine.

Before the Jencks family came along, the cemetery was in serious decline. Dilapidated might be too kind a word. Grave markers were toppled, weeds were everywhere, the road was a crumbling mess. The sagebrush was winning.

Virtually every Murphy's Law known to man had hit the old graveyard. In better days it was an important part of Bingham City, the municipality that was incorporated in 1904 barely a decade after the discovery of copper and the open-pit mining technique that made it wildly profitable.

For years, Bingham City was the de facto copper capital of the world, but over time, as the open-pit mine above it expanded, it was squeezed out by its own success, By 1971 the city, what was left of it, was dis-incorporated — an official ghost town.

That left the cemetery on its own. There was a fire. There was a flood. There was vandalism. The responsibility for the graveyard, under state law, went to the resident school system, in this case Jordan School District, which, to be fair, was not in the cemetery business.

Then, in 1998, along came the Jenckses.

Lori Jencks' father, Don Harryman, was dying from an untreatable illness and wanted to explore his family roots while he still could. All his life he'd heard about a family plot in the Bingham Cemetery.

When Lori and her family went to investigate, they dug through the overgrowth and the rubble to uncover the graves of their long-lost relatives.

How many other graves, they wondered, also needed to be uncovered?

And who — if not them — was going to keep this cemetery from dying?

Brad Jencks decided to adopt the Bingham City Cemetery as his Eagle Scout project — and the recovery was on.