This time next year, Stockton Mayor Mark Whitney hopes the town will prepare for its Memorial Day ceremony in a new veterans memorial park.
A committee of veterans was formed last year to locate, design and fund a park space for veterans and the town’s founders. At the Stockton Town Council meeting on May 14, the location for the new park was finalized.
In 2006, Stockton resident Rulon Aufdemorte donated a lot for the park. The council determined the location wasn’t suitable due to concerns about parking.
The park will instead be moved to the town’s north entrance at the corner of SR-36 and Kings Way. Whitney said the property is larger than the donated lot, which will be returned, and has room for the park to expand.
Gathering funds for the park will be the most difficult piece to make the park happen, Whitney said. So far the committee has received a $1,000 donation from a Moose Lodge golf tournament and a $5,000 grant from Tooele County.
The committee tasked with ensuring the park happens includes veterans Terry Edwards, Jack Hollien, Kent Baker, George Anderson, John Rydalch, Steve Bevan, Ken Edwards, John Sandstorm and Nando Mali.
Ken Edwards said the grant from the county will go toward installing flagpoles on the designated property, including one for each branch of the U.S. military: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. Another flag will be flown for prisoners of war and those missing in action.
Edwards and Whitney both said they expect the flags could go up on the property as soon as this summer. Landscaping will be completed by master gardeners and feature drought resistant plants suited for Stockton’s climate, Edwards said.
Finishing any monuments to accompany the flags is an issue of funding, Edwards said. He said he’d like to see monuments for each branch and POW/MIA, as well as one for the Navajo Code Talker who lived in Stockton and was one of the first local casualties of the Vietnam War.
“It’s a work in progress,” he said. “We hope to have it done within two to three years.”
Whitney also said the memorial park would be a nice way to mark the entrance to the town.
“We’re really excited about how it will welcome people into the Town of Stockton,” he said.
There will be a community yard sale later this year to help fund the park, Whitney said. The town and private citizens will provide goods for the sale, with all proceeds going to the memorial park, he said.
Edwards said that a space is needed in the town that not only remembers the sacrifice of local servicemen and servicewomen, but all U.S. veterans.
“All I want to do is honor the veterans,” he said.
Whitney said he hopes to have enough completed at the park to unveil it a year from now on Memorial Day.
“If we can get something done there this fall and into next spring, it’d be nice to have a ribbon cutting,” he said.