Utah Heritage Foundation

UHF members, trustees, and staff will be headed to Cedar City and beyond this year to experience preservation in Iron County on our 2011 Road Trip on Saturday, June 25.  We hope you'll consider joining us for this one-of-a-kind, behind-the-scenes guided tour of some of the renowned and lesser known historic sites.  We've got a full day lined up along with some fun surprises and special guests.

It's also a BIG weekend in "Festival City USA" (Cedar City's moniker) with the opening of the Utah Shakespeare Festival on Friday, June 24, and a weekend-long music festival, Groovefest. 

So if you're a fan of live music, live theater, and preservation, this trip is for you.  "To be or not to be" on our Road Trip?  That is the question.  If you want to be, check out the full line-up on our website and register today.  For the first time, we are offering a children's rate so we hope you'll make it a family outing!

Cedar City started implementing a 5-year downtown revitalization strategy in 1996.  Fourteen years later, stakeholders revisited and updated that plan with the help of the consulting team Hyett-Palma who did the original study through the National League of Cities “America Downtown” program.

Doyle Hyett and Dolores Palma returned to Cedar City the first week of November 2010 to hold a new round of scoping meetings.  The kickoff for the general public on Monday, November 1^st brought out a crowd of about 120 people despite competing with other community events, the final game of the World Series and Monday Night Football.  Utah Heritage Foundation was represented at the meetings by Central and Southern Utah Field Representative Susan Crook, who sits on the board of the Cedar City Downtown Retail Alliance to advise on historic preservation.

Groovacious, Groovefest. What is this, the 1960s?  Seems like it when you walk into Tim and Lisa Cretsinger’s record store – that’s right, record store – Groovacious in Cedar City, Utah. They moved their entire inventory of old vinyl and newer media from Keizer, Oregon in 2000. Tim vows they’ll never move again. 

His search for a stand-alone building with a cozy, lived-in feeling brought him to this former Lin’s Market a block off the main drag in the historic heart of Festival City USA. Only problem was, the owner was using the old Lin’s for storage with no intention of leasing. With his first load of inventory in town and a determination not to haul it back to Oregon, Tim sat down with his prospective landlord on a roll of carpet and convinced him that the old building would be more profitable as a record store than a storage unit.

The Hunter House restoration has been taken over by a SWATC team.  High school students enrolled in the Southwest Applied Technology College (SWATC) building construction class are repairing plaster, restoring a fireplace, and stripping and refinishing wood trim as part of the second phase of work on the historic home.  Other contractors began the restoration with repair of the foundation and re-roofing after the house was moved to the Frontier Homestead State Park Museum (formerly Iron Mission State Park) in 2005 to prevent its demolition.  Utah Heritage Foundation was instrumental in the advocacy process that led to arrangements for saving it.

As you may remember, Utah Heritage Foundation helped sound the alarm when the Hunter House, residence of founders of Cedar City, was threatened with demolition for a parking lot in 2007. UHF and the State Historic Preservation Office acted in partnership, though playing different roles during the process, to advise Cedar City as to their options and advocate for choices other than demolition.  Cedar City committed to move the house to Iron Mission State Park to save it with an agreement from the Hunter Family and State Parks to rehabilitate the house for interpretation.

Today, a restoration plan has been developed, the foundation has been finished, the mortar repointed, the chimneys rebuilt, the bay window reinstalled, the porch rebuilt (still needs some finishing), the carpet and linoleum removed, and the roof replaced.

This coming year, Todd Prince, Iron Mission State Park's Manager says they are hoping to install electrical, strip the floors, finish the porch, and begin refinishing the ceilings and walls.

Make a point to stop by Iron Mission State Park to see the Hunter House in progress and visit the park.