Cedar Fort residents work together in cemetery

  October 12, 2017, 9:16 am

By Charlynn Anderson

CEDAR FORT -- Equipped with tape measures, clipboards and work gloves, between 40 and 50 volunteers worked together Saturday, September 10, to map features and install road borders in the Cedar Fort Cemetery.

Beginning at 6:30 a.m., Harry Draper cooked a hearty pancake-and-eggs breakfast for the early risers. Vickie Draper, president of the Sons and Daughters of Cedar Valley history preservation society, organized the mapping teams who then walked through the cemetery measuring and recording the location of each headstone, tree and bush.

"We have five different maps of the cemetery, and no two agree," said Draper. "We need to see what's really here," she emphasized.

Some of the volunteers had only enough time on a busy Saturday to map their own family plots while others stayed for the entire six-hour project. For Brad and LaNae Kirkham of American Fork, the mapping efforts turned into a history hunt. Having grown up in Cedar Fort, La Nae has a keen interest in the town's pioneer history. She participates in the Sons and Daughters of Cedar Valley history museum project. As they mapped five sections of the cemetery, the Kirkhams shared the stories of early Cedar Fort pioneers.

"I forgot that Sarah Ann Williams Daw was buried here," LaNae said when she came upon the headstone of one of the Willie Handcart Company pioneers. "I remembered that Annie Wilcox's grave was here," she said, pointing to another headstone erected to memorialize a Cedar Fort pioneer.

As a baby, Annie Petersen Wilcox was wrapped in a blanket and left for dead along the trail. But her grieving mother walked all the way back to the hasty grave to find the baby alive. Annie Wilcox grew up to become a beloved wife, mother and midwife in Cedar Fort.

While many of the volunteers mapped headstones and greenery, others edged the roads with landscape timbers provided by the town. The road crew measured and marked the roads, drilled holes in the timbers, then staked them into place by pounding rebar into the holes.

Tom Peterson, whose parents are buried in the Cedar Fort Cemetery, characterized the team's efforts as "a good day's work."