[5] First settled principally by white Mormon farmers, the community became much more diverse after about 1890, when the development of the area's coal mines brought an influx of immigrants from Southern Europe and other regions.

Groups of friends and relatives joined the first few homesteaders, mostly independent minded people who were separate from the organized Mormon project to establish what became Emery County.

The early settlers were nonconformists, less religious and less social than their counterparts in other Utah settlements, so the community was slow to develop.

The LDS Church organized the first ward here in 1883,[6] but it was not until the winter of 1886–7 that a company was formed to build an irrigation canal, which was not completed until 1893.

[citation needed] Spring Glen lies along the Price River, just to the south of Helper and southwest of Kenilworth.