Midvale’s newest greenspace also happens to be the location of Midvale’s oldest building... and oldest gravesites. 

A small log house known as the Drown Cabin was home to a family with 10 children on Center Street, served as a playhouse for others in Midvale Park, and now stands at 7670 S. Lind Lane in the Founders Point area. Visitors may wonder about the large stone monument at the south end of the space known informally as Pioneer Memorial Park. Unlike the cabin, the monument remains more or less in its original location, in what was once known as the Cutler Pioneer Cemetery. 

A historic marker for the cabin was installed and rededicated by International Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) on March 30.

The Cutler family was one of the first Mormon pioneer families to settle the area that is now known as Midvale. Before a formal city cemetery was established in the 1920s, it was common to bury deceased family members in family plots. The Cutlers let other pioneer families and settlers passing through bury loved ones on their land starting in 1854. 

“There are a bunch of Glovers that are buried in that cemetery by the cabin,” said Midvale City Councilmember Paul Glover. “There’s got to be nine or 10 Glovers buried there, mostly children.”

A few years later and a quarter mile to the east, a group of log cabins were built near what is now the intersection of Main and Center Streets. In 1866, David Drown helped William and Sarah Bennett build a cabin with logs hauled out from Big Cottonwood Canyon. Two years later, the Bennetts traded up to a brick and mortar house and gave the cabin to the Drown family. The modest home served as a primary residence for the Drown family for several years. It was then either taken apart and rebuilt further back from the road, or one of the two rooms was demolished before moving it to the back of the lot, according to Chloe Harper, a DUP historian. 

“It became the ‘summer shanty’ where cooking and washing was done,” said Jan Litster, DUP company marker chair and lifelong Midvale resident. “Then at different times it was a house for sleeping, a storehouse, a stable and a woodshed. At one point it was a place where ladies would get together to quilt or have afternoon tea.”

Pushed out by progress

Within 40 years of the first burial at Cutler Hill, the U.S. Mining and Smelting Company (later known as Sharon Steel) had purchased the land surrounding the cemetery. 

“Harmon Cutler’s widow, Agnes McGregor Cutler, was left with five small children to care for and was forced to sell the farm, bit by bit, to the mining companies to support herself and her children,” said Brett Cutler.

There’s a photo taken in1906 that shows smokestacks looming over at least seven neglected headstones. The next year the smelter posted notices in the newspaper, offering to pay $10 each for the removal of the 50 remains on its property to other cemeteries, but only a few families took them up on the offer. City records show that 16 or 17 bodies were exhumed and moved, according to a report prepared by Sverdrup Environmental in 1996. 

“Many of the deceased were children and Harmon Cutler had this property where they could be buried,” Litster said. “They didn’t have descendants, and their families moved elsewhere. One was a family that immigrated from Norway. They had a 13-year-old boy who had been badly burned and died two days after they arrived in Midvale.”

In the 1930s the smelter began to bury the cemetery under a pile of waste material containing iron sulfur and arsenic. 

In 1936, the last surviving pioneer who had grown up in the Drown Cabin passed away, and her family presented the historic structure to the DUP so that it might be preserved. The lot where it stood on Center Street was set to be developed, and so the cabin was moved to Midvale City Park, near the old Midvale Elementary. It stood open to the elements for decades. 

“It had a little rose garden around it,” Litster said. “I thought it was my own little playhouse.” Glover also recalls playing in the cabin as a child. 

Final resting place

More than a century after the pioneers arrived, two of the oldest physical reminders of their presence were deteriorating rapidly. But then two things happened: the smelter at Cutler Cemetery closed down in 1968 and a local camp of the DUP restored the Drown Cabin in 1976. A pioneer-era window was installed and the interior was furnished with period furniture and handmade rugs to serve as a reminder of a different time. 

In 1999, the Boys & Girls Club of Midvale purchased the land under the cabin and it was moved again — this time to the site of the Cutler Cemetery. Four years earlier the Environmental Protection Agency had scraped off and hauled away the contaminated soil. Midvale City spent $29,000 to move the cabin, build a new foundation, new doors, a new roof and replace two logs that had rotted. 

In 2013, Connor Thompson arranged for a ground radar technician to survey the area for his Eagle Scout project. The results indicated as many as 80 remains. In 2017, a ring of townhomes were constructed, leaving a half acre of greenspace around the cabin and the sandstone base of the one remaining headstone. 

In November 2021, Alex Szymanski recruited six friends to work on the cabin for his Eagle Scout project. They dug out two trailers worth of dirt and installed rustic wood floorboards. The DUP had wanted to leave the original dirt floor, but the water table is too high, which would cause the logs to rot.

Learning that the park was once a cemetery was not a surprise to one resident who wandered over to watch Szymanski’s crew work. After two years of living in the subdivision, Shelby Lindley believed her house was haunted by friendly “visitors.”

“My dogs bark at empty rooms,” Lindley said. “We’ll hear whistling and say, ‘oh that’s just a miner going to work.’” 

Litster concurs that any spirits in the park are friendly. “If your house is haunted, at least you know they were good people,” Litster said.