City Centerville, Davis County
A three mile strip between two older towns, named in 1849 for being exactly between them
Centerville, and the water it made itself a town to go and get.
16,884 people at the 2020 decennial census on about 5.97 square miles, running from the Great Salt Lake flats up to a bench under two canyon mouths. The name comes from an 1849 survey that found the settlement sitting halfway between Farmington and Bountiful. The town incorporated in 1915 for the specific purpose of building a culinary water system, and paid for it with a fifteen thousand dollar bond and wooden pipe. Six pages on the city, plus a clean handover to the seven county subjects.
I work Southern Utah, a long drive south of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. Every figure below was read where it is issued: Centerville City's own code, parks, museum, utility and trails pages and the trail map it publishes; the National Park Service register file and the multiple property nomination written for this town in 1997; the federal historic preservation council; the Utah Geological Survey; and the state transit and tax agencies. Each fact carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent handles the work on the ground.
Start here
A town that became a town so that it could go and build a water system.
Most Utah towns incorporated because they had grown large enough to need a government. Centerville incorporated because it wanted a pipe. The multiple property nomination the state and the federal preservation office accepted for this town in 1997 records the sequence flatly: in 1915 a few local men petitioned the county to incorporate the settlement into a town in order to develop a culinary water system, bonds were issued for fifteen thousand dollars to pay for it, any resident who wanted the house connected paid five dollars, and the first system was built of wire wrapped wooden pipe. The town threw a ball on 19 April 1916 to celebrate the waterworks being finished, and the wooden pipes lasted until they were swapped for metal in 1936.
That is not a charming aside. It is the key to the place, because water is still what Centerville argues about. Four named creeks come down off the bench into the street grid, and the city's own trail map labels them: Ricks, Barnard, Parrish and Deuel. Two entirely separate secondary irrigation systems water the outdoor half of the town, and which one reaches a given parcel, or whether either does, is settled address by address rather than street by street. In 2026 the larger of the two cut its contracts by a fifth and reserved the right to double the cut. The state's geologists have put a number on what one of those four creeks could deliver into the houses below it, and the city sized a basin against that number.
The town itself is a strip roughly three miles long and about a mile wide before the ground flattens out west toward the lake, holding 16,884 people at the 2020 decennial census on about 5.97 square miles, wedged between Farmington to the north and Bountiful to the south. It got its name from being exactly there. When the settlement was surveyed in the autumn of 1849 it was written down as Centreville because it sat roughly halfway between the two, and the city's own history dates the naming to a survey in 1850. One of those years is the nomination's and one is the city's, and this companion prints both rather than smoothing it.
Centerville at a glance
16,884
counted at the 2020 decennial census
1915
incorporated in order to build a water system
26
properties individually on the National Register
4
named creeks off the bench, on the city's own map
The layout
Four bands running north to south, and the freeway is the seam between two of them.
Centerville is narrow east to west and long north to south, which means the useful mental map is a set of stripes rather than a set of neighborhoods. Each stripe has a different elevation, a different set of rules attached to it and a different list of things to check before an offer. Sorting them takes ten minutes and saves a fortnight.
| The bench top | The old grid | The Parrish Lane corridor | The west flats | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it is | The highest streets, east of roughly 600 to 700 East, under the canyon mouths | Main Street, which is State Route 106, and the platted blocks either side of Center Street | The mile of 400 North between the freeway and Main Street, plus both interchanges | West of Main Street and out past the parkway toward the wetlands |
| What is on it | The Deuel Creek and Parrish trailheads, Freedom Hills Park with its two trail doors and seven trailer stalls, and the shoreline corridor above the top streets | City Hall at 250 North Main, the Heritage Museum in the Whitaker House at 168 North Main, the co-op corner at Main and Center, and most of the twenty six Register listings | Centerville Marketplace and Legacy Crossing, the Management and Training Corporation head office on Market Place Drive, and the freeway ramps | Community Park at 1350 North 400 West, Porter Walton Park, the Legacy trailhead at the end of Pages Lane, and the preserve beyond it |
| What the ground is doing | Steep, dry, south facing on the Parrish side and shaded on the Deuel side, with debris basins at the canyon mouths | The 1849 survey grid on gentle fall, with mature street trees and the oldest housing stock in the city | Flat and commercial, carrying both the freeway ramp and the parkway ramp on one street | Flat, open, wind driven and low, running out toward wetland rather than toward beach |
| The rule attached to it | Personal fireworks are prohibited here every 1 July to 31 July under city ordinance, and the boundary is published in street names | Twenty six Register listings and a city walking tour of twenty five historic homes, all of them private property | Nothing unusual, beyond a redevelopment project area and a zoning code text amendment the city had out for comment in August 2026 | Which secondary irrigation system reaches a parcel, and whether one does at all |
| Where it is written on this companion | Deuel Creek and Parrish Canyon | Historic Centerville and William R. Smith Park | Moving to Centerville | Moving to Centerville, and the county lakeside and trail pages |
Addresses and boundaries as published by Centerville City on its parks, trails, museum and utility pages and in municipal code 7.07.160, and by the National Park Service register file for Davis County, all checked 15 August 2026. Elevation runs from lake flat to bench top across this list, which is why the single nominal city elevation of about 4,246 feet is close to meaningless. Prices and current listings live on the practical city guide.
Two different things in this city are called Parrish Lane, they sit on opposite sides of the freeway, and only one of them is a trailhead. Parrish Lane is 400 North, it is State Route 105, and it carries Centerville's only I-15 interchange at exit 319 as well as the city's own Legacy Parkway interchange. That is the west end. The east end of the same street runs 1.2 miles the other way and dead ends at the foothills, and the trailheads for Parrish Canyon are up there. So a sentence about the Parrish Lane trailhead can mean a mountain or a freeway ramp depending on who wrote it. The related error is worth killing at the same time: Parrish Lane is not a Legacy Parkway Trail trailhead. Pages Lane is. The city's own trail map lists the Legacy trailhead at 1275 North off 1250 West and a second at 830 West off Porter Lane in West Bountiful, and Pages Lane is where the paved corridor is reached at the south end of town. If a listing, a review or a trail app tells you otherwise, it has crossed the two.
The long view
Three names in three years, a fort wall that was never finished, and a livery stable that is now a house.
The town changed its name twice before it settled. Thomas Grover was assigned pasture here and arrived in the autumn of 1847, settling on the stream that would carry a different family's name. Osmyn and William Deuel, Aaron Cherry, Nathan Porter, John Evarts and James Brinkerhoff joined him in 1848, and the place became known as Deuel Creek. Cherry then bought out Grover's claim and renamed the creek and the settlement Cherry Creek. Two years after that the survey landed and the town was written down as Centreville, for the plain reason that it was halfway between the two towns either side. The Cherry name survives on the National Register in the listing for the Nathan and Rebecca Cherry and Eliza Ford Porter Farmstead, which is a tidy loop for a name most people here have never heard.
Samuel Parrish and his son Joel arrived in 1848 and settled a stream half a mile north of the Cherry Creek group, which is how the canyon, the lane and the freeway exit all ended up carrying one surname. Shadrach Roundy took the creek further north in the spring of 1848, and that one was later named for Joel Ricks, who did not arrive until 1849. Four creeks, four sets of arrivals, and the street grid still sits on top of the answer.
The defensive chapter is short and it left nothing behind. By 1853 there were around 194 people here and a rock wall was begun to enclose a nine block area of the town. Work stopped, restarted in 1854 in mud and adobe, and the west line was never finished at all. No evidence of the fort wall remains above ground. The town that grew instead was laid out loosely on the Plat of the City of Zion, with twenty residential blocks around a central church block, and then it did something most Utah settlements did not: it also grew linearly along Main Street, with farmsteads out beyond the grid. The nomination is explicit that Centerville is as much a line as it is a square, and that combination is still the shape of the old town today.
The building people ask about is the 1866 one. William Reeves put up a Wells Fargo livery stable that year, and when the railroad was finished he converted it into an amusement hall for dances and dramatic performances, known as Elkhorn Hall. It is at 186 East Center Street, it carries a Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker raised in 1948, it is not on the National Register, and it is somebody's house. The federal preservation council said so in 2005 and the 1997 nomination said so first. The old grid page carries the marker, the twenty six listings and the stonemason whose corner stones you can learn to read at a glance.
The railroad chapter is where the town's economy turned. Grasshoppers took most of the crops in 1868 and a good many Centerville men went to work for the Utah Central, which was finished in 1870 and immediately ran daily riders down to Salt Lake City. By 1871 farmers here were selling produce into a city market they could reach in an hour. The Denver and Rio Grande laid track through Davis County between 1881 and 1883, the Hot Springs line reached Centerville by 1894, and the Bamberger arrived in the county in 1898 on its way from Salt Lake City to Ogden. In 1913 the Utah Light and Traction Company ran a trolley up Main Street with its terminus at Chase Lane, reserving certain hours for passengers and everything else for freight. Four rail companies inside thirty years, in a town of a few hundred people.
The first culinary water main in this town was made of wooden pipe wrapped in wire, and when it was finished in the spring of 1916 the town held a ball.
The county
Four Davis subjects land on this town, and the other three are a drive.
Davis County carries seven subjects written once for all fifteen cities, so no companion rewrites them. Centerville has real standing in four and a sentence's worth in the rest, and the four below are the ones a Centerville address genuinely uses in an ordinary year.
Straight up the hill
The Davis canyons
Two of the county's eight canyon mouths open inside these city limits, and the crest road above them, its gate season and the terraces on the face are all on the county page.
Read the guideOut the west end
The Legacy Parkway Trail
Pages Lane runs west into the paved corridor, and the county page has the length, the surfaces, the trailhead list and the widening work running through 2026.
Read the guideDays out
Family weekends in Davis County
What a paid day out in this county costs and when it opens, priced and seasoned rather than sorted by who it suits.
Read the guideThe view from up there
Antelope Island
The thing you look at from the top of the Parrish sunset loop, with its causeway, its fees and its October roundup written once for the county.
Read the guideThree of the seven county subjects are somebody else's ground, and Centerville can offer a drive time and an honest sentence on each. The bay, its education center and the access permit rule that took effect on 1 July 2026 are in Farmington, north of here. The air force base is at the far north end of the county, roughly seventeen miles up the freeway, and it reaches this town as a commute rather than as a neighbor. The county's ponds and beaches are one exit either way and none of them is in Centerville: the only standing water inside these city limits is an undeveloped retention pond at Lee Skabelund Memorial Nature Park on 100 South at 700 East, with street parking and nothing else. This city's water edge is preserve and wetland rather than pond and shoreline, and pretending otherwise would be inventing an amenity. All seven subjects are indexed on the Davis County hub.
If you only have one day
One canyon before breakfast, the old grid on foot, and a sunset a thousand feet up.
First thing
Walk up the shaded one
Three doors off one dirt road at the end of 100 South. The south branch reaches moving water within minutes and the log bridges keep going the whole way up.
The Deuel Creek pageLate morning
Read the corner stones
One stonemason and his three sons built most of the rock houses here, and they signed the work with granite quoins cut for a temple. Once you see it you cannot stop seeing it.
The old grid pageMidday
Sit under the old trees
Two blocks from City Hall, forty stalls, a pavilion for a hundred, and a monument that opens its account of this town a year later than the city does.
The park pageEvening
Take the short loop up
Under two miles round from the dead end of Parrish Lane puts you six hundred feet up looking at the lake, the island and the length of the front.
The Parrish Canyon pageThe rhythm
The calendar here is set by water, by fire risk and by one week at the start of July.
Spring opens with an envelope. The irrigation company that serves part of the town sends shareholders a letter each April, and the 2026 one, dated 7 April, is where the sharp numbers live: the company held its own assessment rates at 2025 levels, while the wholesaler that serves the rest of town cut contracts by twenty per cent for the year and reserved the right to take that to forty per cent as the water year went on, with contract charges rising by roughly eighteen per cent a year for two years after that. Secondary water turns on 15 May for both systems in a normal year, and drought moves it. All of that is on the mover page, with the dates it was checked.
Then the parks come alive on a published schedule that nobody reading a listing would guess at. Centerville's parks are open daily from seven in the morning until ten at night all year, but full restroom facilities and water services run only from 15 April to 15 October. A pavilion costs twenty five dollars for a resident and fifty for everyone else, flat across the whole system, and a field is ten dollars an hour without lights. Those prices were read at the city on 15 August 2026 and they move annually.
July is the loudest month and it runs two ways at once. The city puts on a three date Freedom Festival with a children's parade on the evening of 3 July, a parade up Main Street on the fourth behind a flyover scheduled for 8:38 in the morning, and a fireworks blast at 9:45 that night at Community Park on the west side of town. At exactly the same time, municipal code 7.07.160 prohibits anyone discharging personal fireworks anywhere in the mapped east bench area from 1 July to 31 July. Both are the city's own, both are current, and a household on the top streets needs to hold both at once. The festival page carries the whole schedule and the boundary.
Autumn and winter belong to the canyons and to the museum. The Deuel Creek trails go most of the year because the canyon bottom starts around 4,627 feet, and the honest caution is ice on the log crossings after a storm rather than a closed season. The Heritage Museum in the Whitaker House keeps two days a week, Tuesday from ten until six and Thursday from five until eight, closed the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. Two open days is not much, and it is the reason this companion put the museum inside the old town page rather than giving it one of its own.
The one seasonal subject this city does not own is the crest road. Skyline Drive runs along the top of the range above these canyons on a gate schedule that belongs to the Forest Service and to the county canyons page, along with the terraces cut across the face in the 1930s and the countywide rule on dogs. Nothing on this companion explains any of them, because writing them twice would be writing them worse.
A city that runs a fireworks display on the west side of town during the same month it bans them outright on the east side is not being inconsistent. It is being specific about where the dry ground is.
The Centerville companion
Seven pages, and four of them turn on water or on stone.
Everything The Local has written about Centerville itself: the shaded creek canyon with three doors off one dirt road, the dry slope with a short walk and a long climb both leaving from the same lot, the old grid and the twenty six listings on it, the park with two live names and a monument in it, the three days at the start of July, and the homework a Centerville address actually asks a household to do.
Quick answers
Centerville, answered.
Because a survey found it sitting in the middle. The multiple property nomination accepted for this town records that in the autumn of 1849 the Cherry Creek settlement area was surveyed and written down as Centreville, the location being roughly halfway between Farmington and Bountiful. The city's own history page dates the same event to 1850 and phrases it as the town naturally taking on the name of Centerville. The two issuers give different years for the survey, so both are printed here rather than one being picked.
Both years are correct about different things, and the two sources in town do not agree on which to lead with. Centerville City states that Centerville was first settled in 1847 by Thomas Grover, who was assigned to pasture cattle here and arrived in the autumn. The multiple property nomination adds that Osmyn and William Deuel, Aaron Cherry, Nathan Porter, John Evarts and James Brinkerhoff joined him in 1848, and that Samuel Parrish and his son Joel arrived the same year. Meanwhile the Sons of Utah Pioneers monument standing in the city's own Founders Park opens its account of the town in 1848.
In 1915, and for a very specific reason. The multiple property nomination records that a few local men petitioned the county to incorporate the settlement into a town in order to develop a culinary water system, that bonds were issued for fifteen thousand dollars to pay for it, that residents who wanted a house connected paid a five dollar connection fee, and that the first system was built of wire wrapped wooden pipe. The town held a ball on 19 April 1916 to celebrate the waterworks being finished. The wooden pipes were replaced with metal in 1936. The city publishes the year only, not a day or a month.
Two canyon trailheads and an old street grid, mostly. Deuel Creek has three separate doors off one dirt road at the end of 100 South, with a cascade minutes from the south trailhead and a waterfall higher up. Parrish Canyon offers a short walk to a rock art panel, a 1.95 mile loop to a viewpoint above the lake, or a full day toward Bountiful Peak, all from the same dead end. Beyond that the town carries twenty six National Register listings, a city walking tour of twenty five historic homes, seven city parks, a heritage museum open two days a week, and a three day Freedom Festival at the start of July.
No. The commuter rail line runs through the town and does not stop in it. The nearest platforms are Woods Cross at 750 South 800 West to the south and Farmington at 450 North 850 West to the north. A bus rapid transit line called the Davis to Salt Lake City Community Connector is planned to run 26 miles from the Farmington station to Research Park at the University of Utah, serving Farmington, Bountiful, Centerville, North Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, and it is a plan: the transit authority publishes no opening year for it. Local bus service and the app hailed South Davis on demand zone are the current answers.
The answer is different depending which half of the town you are standing in, and both halves are the city's own. On the flat west side, the city itself puts a display up at Community Park at a quarter to ten on the evening of 4 July. On the higher ground east of roughly 600 East, residents may not discharge them at all for the whole of July, under a restriction the city writes down as an area bounded by named streets rather than as a map. There is a further rule that applies anywhere in town all year, wherever there is undeveloped ground or dry hillside vegetation next door. The moving here page has the boundary and the ordinance number.
Seven, and the city publishes an address for every one: Community Park at 1350 North 400 West, Freedom Hills Park at 2150 North 150 East, Island View Park at 750 East 500 South, Lee Skabelund Memorial Nature Park at 100 South 700 East, Porter Walton Park at 95 South 400 West, Smoot Park at 75 West 1500 North, and William R. Smith Park, which the city also calls Founders Park, at 300 North 100 East. Parks are open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and full restroom facilities and water services run from 15 April to 15 October only. Those figures were read at the city on 15 August 2026.
Not a National Register historic district, no, and that distinction matters if you are buying. What Centerville has is twenty six individually listed properties, one building that was removed from the Register in 2015, a January 2005 Preserve America designation from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a city walking tour booklet covering twenty five historic homes, and a multiple property nomination titled Historic Resources of Centerville, Utah, prepared in March 1997, which is the framework the individual listings were evaluated against. Fourteen of the twenty six were listed on a single day, 17 November 1997.
Two of them do, and which one reaches a particular property is an address level question rather than a city level one. Part of the town is served by Weber Basin Water Conservancy District contract areas and part by the Centerville Deuel Creek Irrigation Company, a shareholder company with a record at the Utah Division of Water Rights and its own annual shareholder letter. Some parcels have neither. Secondary water turns on 15 May for both in a normal year. Ask the seller and the city in writing which system, if either, serves a specific address, and ask before an offer rather than after.
Six pages on the town, and a short list of questions to ask before an offer.
A day in Centerville is a shaded creek, a dry slope, four blocks of stone houses and a park under old trees. An address here asks a narrower set of questions than any of that suggests: which of the four bands a street sits in, whether it falls inside the July fireworks line the ordinance draws in street names, which of the two secondary irrigation systems reaches the parcel or whether neither does, what the debris basin at the canyon mouth above it is sized for, and what the property tax notice looks like after the hearing on 25 August 2026. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works this bench, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.