Roger Rowley, along with two companion speakers, took to the podium during the Carbon County Historical Society’s June meeting to enlighten members and guests on the history of Spring Glen.
Rowley opened the meeting with a joke before turning the time over to a guest speaker who presented information about his family’s dairy farm.
Ike Fazzio, a long-time resident of Spring Glen, stated that he was thrilled to be able to speak at the meeting. When Fazzio thinks about Spring Glen, he believes that the residents have tried to keep the town a secret. They did not want the population to rapidly grow, although it is becoming more of a popular place to live.
Fazzio’s grandfather was orphaned as a young man in Italy until he left in the 1800s. When he first came to America, he worked in Sunnyside until he was able to save enough money to purchase the 80 acres in Spring Glen that Fazzio still owns today. His grandfather then built his family a home and brought them over from Italy to live. “Grandpa was not a lazy man, he was a hard worker,” Fazzio stated.
Those 80 purchased acres turned into what was known as Blue Hill Dairy. The dairy farm operated for many years. Fazzio’s grandfather, father and then Fazzio himself, until he turned 18, worked the dairy. He was a member of the Army for three years, went to school and worked for the government for some time. Fazzio didn’t return to Spring Glen until his father began getting older. Once it was time to sell the cows and stop production for the dairy farm, Fazzio’s father was devastated. According to Fazzio, his father had names for every cow, as if they were pets. He had only seen his father cry twice in his life, that being one of them.
“The fields were green in Spring Glen when they weren’t green anywhere else,” Fazzio said as the reason his grandfather chose Spring Glen.
Kay Rukavina also spoke about the Slavic people of Spring Glen. Her family settled there around 1932. Rukavina’s mother and father were both born in the same area of Yugoslavia, with her parents immigrating in 1924 when her mother was 28. Her mother started out in Murray, Utah with her father first living in Pennsylvania. The pair met in Salt Lake City, where they were married. Eventually, they made their way to Carbon County to work in the coal mines. The family lived in Spring Canyon and ran a boarding house for a while before they moved to a farm in Spring Glen in 1932, in which Rukavina still resides.
Rowley then spoke again, giving a brief history on the founders of Spring Glen. The earliest recorded settler is James Davis Gay, a bachelor from Spanish Fork that discovered how fertile the ground was along the west side of the Price River and decided to start a farm there. Teancum Pratt was also credited with being one of the first founders.
Rowley then took time to touch on the old schoolhouse. When it was first constructed, it was a two-room building, built in 1904. In 1912, another two rooms were added. Rowley’s father was the principal of the school from 1925 through 1958.