Cove Fort has always been more than an average rest stop. Now 157 years old, this volcanic rock outpost near the Interstate 15/70 junction outside of Beaver has its roots in a time of conflict. Yet, through the years, it has proven itself to be a place of peace and comfort, with only one bullet ever being fired toward another human being.

The fort was constructed on the Mormon Corridor – an array of roads and trails branching out between Salt Lake City, St. George and settlements beyond. Merchants, farmers and religious pioneers sought safe haven and warm meals here at what is now Utah’s only remaining civilian frontier fort.

Automobiles and semi-trailer trucks whiz down the super highways. Volcanic hillsides descend to a tree-lined valley where Cove Fort abides the ages. Its thick outer walls and wagon-size wooden doors loom large, but not as big as the smiles on the friendly faces of the tour guides inside.

Louise Crosby and husband Richard Crosby served as a senior missionary couple in the St. George Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They received a serendipitous – and some might say “inspired” – phone call asking them to move to the fort, which is a Church-owned historic site,

“I was thrilled,” Louise Crosby said. “Cove Fort is special to
our family.”

The fort has been part of her family’s heritage going back four generations: Her great-grandfather Ira Hinckley was the fort’s builder and first caretaker.

 

On April 12, 1867, Church President Brigham Young sent a letter to Hinckley, who was a blacksmith in Coalville. The call was not unlike the call Louise and Richard received. Young asked Hinckley to move and construct a new fort near Cove Creek. Like his great-granddaughter, Hinckley obliged without hesitation.

Hinckley was an early Church member and had lived in Nauvoo, Illinois, but violence there compelled Hinckley to migrate west.

“We wish to get a good and suitable person to settle and take charge. A man of sound practical judgment and experience. Your name has been suggested,” Young wrote to Hinckley. “The object of building a fort is to afford protection to the telegraph and mail stations and to travelers who are almost constantly on the road.”

A man of action and not a letter writer, Hinckley simply requested the courier say to Young that he would “be there on the appointed day with conveyance prepared to go.” He left Coalville five days later and traveled 220 miles to the proposed fort’s location.

Early expeditions into South-ern Utah sent by Young marked Cove Creek as an ideal spot for a future community as early as 1849. The creek didn’t supply enough water to sustain a large settlement, so towns eventually sprang up in other spots. Nevertheless, settlers increasingly ventured through the area because it was a convenient place to camp along the trail between the territorial capitol of Fillmore and the closest town to the south, Beaver.

Charles and Eleanor Willden were the first settlers who attempted to put down roots in the Cove Creek crossroads. After completing a Church mission in Cedar City in 1859, the Willdens purchased 160 acres and built an adobe house encircled by a cedar post stockade. This ranch became a de facto fort for travelers seeking refuge from the location’s unpredictable weather conditions.

 

As the Mormon Corridor of settlements stretching from Idaho to Nevada expanded farther south through Utah, conflict escalated between the new pioneers and the American Indians who already inhabited the area. A failed negotiation over the killing of 15 head of cattle led to a series of raids led by Ute Chief Black Hawk across the region, some of which targeted the Willden homestead in 1865. The Willdens moved to Beaver after narrowly surviving the attacks but sustaining heavy losses to their livestock. They abandoned Fort Willden, leaving travelers without a sanctuary from Ute warriors or severe weather.

Hinckley, with help from his brother Arza, gathered craftsmen from nearby settlements to survey and build the fort when he arrived in 1867. From April to November, workers constructed the fort from volcanic rock quarried from surrounding mountains. Head stonemason Nicholas Paul used his personal formula for cementing the rocks with a lime mortar that has held the walls together through the ages. The team plotted the fort with walls 100 feet long, 18 feet high and 4 feet thick, with an arched 14-foot square gateway on the east end.

The plan included 12 rooms, half of them bedrooms for residents and lodging for guests, and the other half public rooms, including the kitchen and dining area. Each room had a chimney. Laborers used locally sourced lumber, mostly juniper and pine, for the roof and doors.

Outbuildings included one of the largest barns in Utah at the time, a bunkhouse and a blacksmith shop. A stagecoach company owned and boarded stock in the barn, where hired hands groomed and fed fresh horse teams for the twice-daily stagecoaches that cycled through the fort. Postal express riders kept fast horses for a roughly 60-hour stretch delivering mail to Cedar City. Modern restorers built a 30-foot-high, 60-by-60-foot replica of the barn near its previous location, and they believe the blacksmith shop’s bellows currently on display originally belonged to Hinckley.

 

After the fort was completed, Ira called for his wife Adelaide and seven children. Several months later, Ira brought another wife, Angeline, and children including a 4-month-old son, Bryant S. Hinckley, who would be the father of future Church President Gordon B. Hinckley. The family immediately began adding interior touches and receiving travelers.

A constant stream of miners, traders and migrants shared conversation and prayers with the Hinckley family at their dinner table each evening. A clicking telegraph kept the fort throbbing with national news. In addition to blacksmithing, Ira ranched hundreds of head of cattle divided into Perpetual Emigration Fund, tithing and personal herds. Adelaide earned the nickname “the good mother of the road” due to the delicious meals she provided for guests.

Elizabeth Kane, a guest traveling with her husband, Thomas – a Civil War general and friend to Young – wrote that she “marveled at the presence of such dainties in that inhospitable looking spot” after encountering the kitchen’s fine tableware and homey bedrooms with well-stocked book collections.

Resident children had plenty of chores to occupy their time. They farmed gardens behind the fort, cared for livestock and foraged neighboring hills for berries, roots and other foodstuffs. Children most enjoyed the excitement of watching from a nearby field of grass as stagecoaches arrived at the fort.

Despite having been built to protect travelers from the threat of Indian attacks, gun ports carved into the walls went unused. The rampages of the Black Hawk War had subsided, and there never was a battle waged at the fort. Still, at least one person was shot at Cove Fort.

Hinckley’s sons, 9-year-old Bryant and 8-year-old Ed, once found a pistol in their parents’ room. They showed it to a preoccupied baby-sitting telegraph operator, who examined the gun and assured them it was unloaded. However, the brothers went back to their parents’ room, where Ed pulled the trigger and accidentally shot Bryant in the knee. Bryant recalled his father walked the floor with him later that night to soothe the pain. Doctors couldn’t remove the bullet, but Bryant recovered quickly. For the rest of his life, he seemed proud of having the distinction of being the only person ever shot at the fort.

The Hinckleys managed the fort for more than 20 years, until the family moved to Fillmore and Ira began serving as Millard Stake President. In the early 1890s, the Church determined the fort was no longer necessary and leased it out, eventually selling it to the William Henry Kesler family, which had resided there for seven years. It was a fortunate choice. Four generations of Keslers maintained the fort for most of the 20th century, operating a motel, picnic area and gas station as the rate of visitors accelerated with advent of the automobile. Cove Fort likely would have disappeared from today’s landscape, as other Church of Jesus Christ frontier forts in Utah have, without the Keslers’ custodianship.

Louise Crosby’s parents, Arza and Erma Hinckley, headed an effort to reacquire the fort in 1988 – when they were both nearly 80 years old.

They solicited Hinckley descendants for money to purchase the fort and organized a cleanup process that enlisted seven children and grandchildren to spruce up the site while they stayed in trailers nearby that summer. Less than a year later, the Hinckleys donated the fort back to the Church, which made further repairs, transported Ira’s Coalville cabin to the site, constructed a visitor center and reopened it to the public.

Ira’s grandson President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated the restored fort on May 21, 1994, saluting his ancestors as men and women of refinement who cultivated the better elements of life in the desert.

“This place was constructed to provide safety and rest, nourishment and comfort,” Hinckley said. “It was operated by good Samaritans who gave succor to those in need. Hunger was satisfied here, wounds were dressed, comfort and hope were spoken, and there was prayer. Gratitude was expressed for the gift of life.”

The Hinckley family brought another gift – an heirloom clock thought to have been originally present during the fort’s operating days. It is displayed atop a fireplace mantle in the nursery bedroom as a sign of the family’s seemingly timeless link to the site.


As the closest community to I-70’s western terminus, the fort is intriguing to history buffs and curious motorists, yet many people don’t stop because they don’t realize it’s only about one mile away from the interstate.

“I can’t tell you how often a visitor will say that they’ve driven by a hundred times but were impressed to stop on that particular day, and how glad they were that they took the time to see and learn more of the fort,” Louise Crosby said.

Cove Fort got a bit of national attention in 2004, when the Federal Highway Administration placed a sign in Baltimore, I-70’s eastern terminus, listing “Cove Fort, 2,200 miles.” The sign was supposed to test the legibility of a new typeface for road signs, and the test apparently was a success. The department received a surge of questions about Cove Fort, prompting a series of Baltimore-area media reports about the Western outpost. Some people in both Utah and Maryland hope the Utah Department of Transportation will reciprocate by placing a sign at Cove Fort listing the distance to Baltimore.

The Crosbys have seen at least two people who were inspired by the signs to travel cross-country from Baltimore and post accounts of their journey on Facebook, but that represents a small fraction of the estimated 2 million visitors the fort has welcomed. The fort regularily attracts more than 70,000 visitors a year. Missionaries provide free, hour-long guided tours year-round from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Senior couples like the Crosbys have the option to serve missions of 12 or 18 months. Approximately nine couples serve during the busiest season of March to November.  This year they are organizing a celebration to commemorate the 30- year anniversary of the dedication of the site. Festivities will take place the last week of May.

For Louise Crosby, every day is a chance to share the “sweet spirit” that still lingers from the sacrifices of all who served at the fort. Her tours have a personal quality. She loves seeing children’s faces as she tells them the cautionary story of how Bryant miraculously survived being accidentally shot by his brother. She shows visitors the parents’ room where her father took her when she was a little girl, pointed inside and said it was the place her grandfather was born.

“Cove Fort is part of who we are, and we are a part of it,” she said. “Though unexpected, this call was positively providential. It’s a tender mercy that’s been a blessing to my life.”

 

This article was originally published in the March/April 2018 issue of Utah Life. Louise and Richard Crosby were released from their missionary service in 2019. Louise Crosby passed away in 2023 in St. George.