Friends of Historic Spring City
Heritage Organization
Spring City, Sanpete County, UT
Friends of Historic Spring City
Founded: 1983 | Incorporated: 1998
Approximately 180 volunteers | Town population: ~1,000
The People Behind It
Founding Members
Joe Bennion
Lee Bennion
M’Lisa Paulsen
Craig Paulsen
Tom Carter
Peter Goss
Past & Current Presidents, 1997-2026
Gene Garner
Marlo Brown
Peter Goss
Barbara Bassett
Wally Scott
Ron Henriksen
Gary Parnell
Alison Anderson
Brian Stucki
Randal Thatcher
Scott Newman
Charles Shepherd
Essential support by hundreds of volunteers, including:
Spring City and Sanpete County residents, homeowners, businesses, and institutions
Professional and lay historians, preservationists, architects, etc.
History- and preservation-focused organizations
Participating professional artists
Crucial donors and philanthropic foundations
Lots of friends, from far and near
At a Glance
The Friends of Historic Spring City receives the Heritage Organization award for more than four decades of sustained, community-rooted work that has maintained the historic character of the best-preserved 19th-century Mormon village settlement in Utah. Founded in 1983 and incorporated in 1998, the Friends has operated across every front that historic preservation requires: restoring the 1899 Old School into a functioning Community Center, rehabilitating the adjacent Junior High into a community activity center, assisting individual property owners through a small grants program for historic houses and agricultural outbuildings, and fighting currently and consequentially to defend the one-acre lots that are the physical foundation of the Plat of Zion layout the National Register district was designated to protect. With roughly 180 volunteers in a town of about 1,000 residents, FOHSC is not an institution operating alongside Spring City; it is woven into the fabric of how the town understands and governs itself.
The Story
Spring City was initially settled in 1852 and developed through the late 19th century as Scandinavian and North American immigrants, encouraged by Brigham Young, built homes and farms along the Plat of Zion grid in what came to be called "Little Denmark." In 1957, when US Highway 89 was rerouted and bypassed the town, Spring City was effectively removed from the flow of commerce and development that reshaped so many Utah communities in the postwar decades. That isolation preserved the town in a way that nothing else could have. What remained was a place that had simply continued, intact.
Spring City's National Register Historic District designation, earned in 1980 and updated in 2022, recognizes the town as an outstanding example of the Mormon Village settlement pattern, vernacular limestone architecture, one-acre lots laid out on Brigham Young's Plat of Zion, and a residential-farming character that has survived where nearly every comparable community has not. The Friends of Historic Spring City emerged to ensure that the designation remained meaningful, defended, and alive in the daily life of the community it describes, not as a top-down institution but as a grassroots organization rooted in the conviction that the people who live in a place are its best and most committed preservationists.
In 2010, Forbes Magazine named Spring City one of America's Prettiest Towns. The more significant story is the one that made it possible: a community that chose, repeatedly and over decades, to protect what it had.
Preservation Work
The centerpiece of FOHSC's project work has been the restoration of the 1899 Spring City Public School, a polychrome-brick Victorian schoolhouse designed by Provo architect Richard C. Watkins, closed for educational use in 1959 and left to deteriorate for decades. Getting it back into use as Spring City's Community Center required more than forty years of sustained effort. FOHSC secured a $100,000 Eccles Foundation grant matched by $160,000 raised through its own fundraising, a $100,000 pledge from the Whitmore family, and a $323,000 grant and $323,000 low-interest loan from the Community Impact Board in 2012. FOHSC pledged to repay the loan, an extraordinary commitment for a volunteer-run organization, and did so in 2023, years ahead of schedule. The Friends also substantially funded the rehabilitation of the adjacent Junior High School building into a community activity center.
Beyond the major restoration projects, FOHSC administers a small grants program that helps individual property owners fund restoration work on National Register-listed buildings and agricultural outbuildings inseparable from the Mormon village character the district was designated to preserve. A scholarship program, established in 2001, supports students pursuing higher education while keeping the community's relationship with its past alive across generations.
The challenge facing Spring City today is not neglect; it is growth. Proposals to subdivide the one-acre lots that define the Plat of Zion layout have generated significant political controversy. A Planning and Zoning Commission survey found that two-thirds of responding residents favor retaining the one-acre minimum. The City Council recently reinstated the one-acre lot zoning, but development proponents have filed for a referendum. FOHSC will remain actively engaged through November 2026 and beyond.
Why It Matters
Heritage Day, held every May since 1983, is simultaneously a fundraiser, a public education event, and a celebration of the living preservation culture that makes Spring City what it is. In 2025, more than 1,100 tickets were sold, the most-attended Heritage Day ever, with nearly 130 paintings auctioned or sold for a net income of over $24,000. Candlelight Christmas, a holiday tour of historic and compatibly-designed homes begun eight years ago, features carolers, seasonal performances in the historic LDS meetinghouse, and a silent auction of Christmas miniatures. Both events have been featured on PBS and draw visitors statewide, many of whom encounter the argument for historic preservation simply by walking through a place that has actually been preserved.
The long-term impact of FOHSC's work is a community that is still substantially its historic self. Spring City has not been homogenized, subdivided, or allowed to decay. Its limestone buildings stand. Its civic buildings have been restored and returned to use. Its agricultural outbuildings have been saved. But the organization's deeper legacy is the culture it has built: one in which over a hundred volunteers show up each year, land use debates are conducted with an eye toward historic integrity, and a small rural community maintains the organizational infrastructure to protect a nationally significant historic district.
That culture is the model. Not the restored building, though the historic building matters. Not the grant awards, though the funding matters. The model is a community that decided what it valued, built an organization to protect it, and kept that organization going through political difficulty, financial constraint, and the ordinary attrition of decades. The Friends of Historic Spring City intend to keep it that way.