The old grid Centerville
Twenty six National Register listings in a town of under seventeen thousand people
Historic Centerville, and the corner stones that give the mason away.
The 1866 Wells Fargo building on Center Street survives, and it is a private house. Around it stand twenty six individually listed National Register properties, fourteen of them added on a single day in 1997, plus one that came off the Register in 2015. A federal nomination written for this town names the mason who built most of the rock houses, records his trademark corner stones, and notes that many of them are believed to be offcuts from a temple thirty miles south.
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.
The live question
Is the 1866 Wells Fargo building still standing in Centerville?
It is, it is at 186 East Center Street, and it is somebody's house. Two federal sources say so independently. The multiple property nomination the National Park Service accepted for this town, prepared in March 1997, records that William Reeves built a Wells Fargo livery stable in 1866, converted it into an amusement hall called Elkhorn Hall when the railroad was finished, and that the building was in use as a residence at the time of writing. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, describing Centerville as a Preserve America Community, says the same thing in its own words: the stagecoach station built in 1866 for the Wells Fargo Company is still in use today as a residence. Both were checked in August 2026.
Two things follow from that and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that this is one of the oldest surviving commercial buildings in Davis County and it stands two blocks from City Hall on a street you can walk. The second is that it is a private home, which means the correct behaviour is to read the Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker from the pavement and keep walking. There is no interior, no opening hour, no tour and no ownership history published beyond the builder's name, and this page is not going to manufacture one.
The thing that should be surprising here is not the building. It is the density of the town around it. Centerville carries twenty six properties individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, plus one that was removed in 2015. Fourteen of the twenty six went on in a single day, 17 November 1997, which is the signature of a thematic nomination, and there is one. That is an extraordinary number for a town of this size, and the practical city guide currently refers to a historic district that does not exist while missing every one of the listings.
The old grid, in numbers
26
properties individually on the National Register
14
of them listed on one day, 17 November 1997
Jan 2005
designated a Preserve America Community
676
sites surveyed in the 1991 and 1994 passes
Three eras
The federal nomination cut this town into three periods, and they are still legible on the street.
The multiple property nomination titled Historic Resources of Centerville, Utah, prepared by a preservation research consultant with state historic preservation office staff on behalf of the city's Historic Sites Committee in March 1997, defines three historic contexts. They are the best available framework for walking the old grid, because each one left a different building material behind.
| Early Settlement and Establishment | The Railroad and Economic Expansion | City Development | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The years | 1847 to 1867 | 1868 to 1910 | 1911 to the 1940s |
| What happened | Grover arrives in autumn 1847; the Deuels, Cherrys, Porters and Parrishes in 1848; a rock fort wall begun 1853 and never finished on its west line; the survey of 1849 that produced the name | Grasshoppers wipe out the 1868 crop and men go to work for the Utah Central; the line opens in 1870 and Centerville farmers start selling into Salt Lake City daily; the co-op opens on the Main and Center corner in 1869 | The trolley reaches Main Street in 1913; the town incorporates in 1915 to build a water system; street lights in 1923; a shade tree commission in 1939; population 961 by 1940 |
| What it built | Log, then adobe, then stone, in that order. Two pioneer log cabins and several adobe buildings were still known to exist in 1997 | Rock and brick houses on the town grid, in hall parlor, central passage and crosswing plans, with Victorian detail arriving near the turn of the century | Bungalows and period cottages filling in the lots as blocks and farmsteads were subdivided, with English Tudor and Colonial Revival between about 1920 and 1940 |
| What you can see now | The Thurston Chase Cabin on Main Street, the Barnard cabin at 1198 North Main, and the stone houses that mark the point the settlement stopped being temporary | The 1903 building on the co-op corner, the 1879 rock meetinghouse at 151 South 200 East, and most of the listed houses | Ron's Phillips 66 Service Station at 278 North Main, listed on the Register in its own right on 26 March 2018 |
| Register listings from it | The earliest are significant for their association with the first phase of settlement and for the craftsmanship of local builders | Fourteen of the twenty six were listed together on 17 November 1997 under this nomination | The 2016 and 2018 listings, including the Smoot Dairy Farmhouse at 1697 North Main and the service station |
Contexts, dates and building sequence quoted from the multiple property documentation form Historic Resources of Centerville, Utah, read at NPGallery on 15 August 2026; listing dates and addresses from the National Park Service register file for Davis County, same date. The nomination's own survey figures are from a 1991 reconnaissance level survey of the core area and a 1994 survey of the outlying areas. Every property named is private unless this page says otherwise.
The 1866 building is a private residence, and so is every house on the city's walking tour. There is a Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker, number 120, erected in 1948 by the Sagamore Camp, standing on East Center Street, and the building behind it is where somebody lives. Read the plaque from the street and keep walking. Do not knock, do not enter the property, do not photograph through windows and do not try to identify the owners. The same rule covers the whole of the rest of this page: the twenty five homes in the city's walking tour booklet and the twenty six Register listings are private property, and a National Register listing places no obligation on an owner to admit anybody. The two places in the old grid that are genuinely open are the Heritage Museum on its two days a week, and the pavement.
How to read a stone house
One mason, three sons, and corner stones cut for a temple thirty miles south.
This is the part that turns a walk down Main Street into something you can actually do. The federal nomination states that Charles Duncan and Sons were responsible for building most of the rock homes in Centerville, that Charles taught the trade to his three sons John, Charles and Archibald, and that the family's masonry spanned from 1853 to 1891. Most of the early rock buildings and culverts in south Davis County were their work. Charles also spent years cutting stone for the Salt Lake City temple during its construction between 1863 and 1867.
And here is the signature. The nomination records that a common or trademark feature of the stone homes the Duncans built is the use of primarily granite or sandstone for the quoins, which are the dressed corner stones, and that Duncan used pieces of stone discarded in the building of the temple for ornamentation. It adds that the quoins on many Centerville houses are believed to be remnants of that temple work. The walls themselves are local rock, probably gathered from dry creek beds and the rocky bench above the town, most often laid in a random ashlar pattern with beaded joints.
Put those two sentences together and you have a way of seeing. Walk the old grid and look at corners. A rough, random, locally gathered stone wall finished off with regular dressed corner blocks in a different and finer stone is a Duncan building, and the corner blocks may well have started life as offcuts from a temple thirty miles down the valley. No plaque tells you this. It is in a 1997 federal document that almost nobody has opened, and it is the single most useful thing anyone can carry down this street.
The city's own history gives the sequence the masonry sits inside, and it is worth having in one line: log, then adobe, then the abundant rock found in many of the historic homes today. That is a chronology written in wall material, and it means a visitor can date a building roughly by what it is made of before ever finding out who built it. The Heritage Museum has a hands on exhibit about the building's architecture, which is a genuinely good place to do the indoor half of this before walking the outdoor half.
One correction to the record while we are here. The nomination names the Duncan family as stonemasons, and there is a John, Harriet, and Eliza Jennett Duncan House at 445 North 400 East on the National Register. The city's museum page separately describes the Whitaker House as a good example of classically inspired stone structures built by locally renowned skilled masons. Those are the same masons. Nobody has joined those two sentences before and they belong together.
The twenty six listings, and the one that came off
The Register listings run from the Melvin Harley Randall House on Porter Lane, listed 20 June 1980, to the Leroy and Alice Cheney House at 676 North Main, listed 12 July 2021. Between them are the Barnard Garn Barber House at 1198 North Main, the Thomas and Margaret Brandon House at 185 East Center, the William Capener House on 400 East, the Duncan House, the Osmyn and Emily Deuel House at 271 South 200 East, the Ford, Ford Rigby, Harris, Harris Tingey, Holland Smith Brown, Kilbourn Leak, Mills Hancock, Cherry and Porter Farmstead, Nathan T. and Anna Porter, Rich Steeper, Roberts, Smith Larsen, Smoot Dairy, Thurston Chase, Tingey, Walton, Wayman and Whitaker properties, and one 1930s roadside filling station. One property, the Young Men's Hall and Tingey House at 85 South 300 East, was listed on 17 November 1997 and removed from the Register on 15 June 2015. Why it came off is not established here and would need a state historic preservation office check, so this page says it was removed and stops.
The museum
A city museum inside a listed stone house, open two days a week.
The city calls the institution Centerville City's Heritage Museum and the building the Whitaker House, and getting that relationship right is worth doing because most descriptions collapse the two into one name. The house is at 168 North Main Street, directly south of City Hall, and it is on the National Register in its own right, listed on 28 March 1996. The city bought it on 1 December 1994. The city publishes the hours and they are narrow: Tuesday from ten in the morning until six in the evening, Thursday from five until eight, closed the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. No admission price is published, so this page does not print one and does not print the word free either.
The building's date needs care, because there is a trap sitting right beside it. A federal profile describes the museum as being in an 1866 house. The city's own museum page and a newspaper account of the building both point to about 1862, when Thomas Whitaker commissioned Charles Duncan to build a one and a half story field stone house from stone off his own property, four years after the Whitakers settled here in 1858. Say early 1860s and leave it there. Do not print 1866 for this building: 1866 is the stagecoach building's year, two blocks away, and mixing the two is the exact error this street invites.
The city's own superlative needs the same handling. The museum page describes the Whitaker House as one of only eleven stone houses built in the 1860s in the area, and does not define the area, which could mean Centerville, Davis County or Utah. A secondary account puts it differently again, as one of only a handful of field stone homes in Davis County at completion. Attribute it as the city's count or drop it, and never let it become a flat claim about the state.
What is inside is the reason to go. The city lists artifacts from the 1800s, historic videos, a Centerville women's history exhibit, a pop up museum, and hands on displays about the building's architecture. That last one is the pairing that makes the old grid work: learn the wall types indoors, then walk out and read them on the street. The silk story is here too, and its verifiable form is that Elizabeth Whitaker made a scarf necktie for Brigham Young in 1862, that he encouraged silk production through the church's women's organisation, and that by 1875 the Deseret Silk Association had been established. The Whitakers are believed to have been the first family in Utah to raise silkworms and spin silk, and believed is the right word to keep.
The details
Getting there
Main Street through Centerville is State Route 106, and the museum sits on it at 168 North, with City Hall immediately north at 250 North and the co-op corner at Main and Center Street two blocks south. Park at City Hall. That single block is the most efficient stop in the town: a listed 1860s stone house you can go inside, a working city hall, and within a five minute walk the corner where the 1869 co-operative stood and the street the 1866 Wells Fargo building is still lived in on.
Before you go
- Two open days a week is genuinely restrictive. Check the hours before you drive, and note the three holiday week closures.
- The city publishes no admission price. Do not assume it is free and do not assume it is not.
- The museum runs named programmes including a heritage fair, a pioneer Christmas, a day named for a local historian and a walking tour, and no dates for any of them are currently published.
- The house is early 1860s. The 1866 date belongs to the stagecoach building on Center Street, not to this one.
Living with it
A federal designation, a walking tour and what a Register listing does and does not do to a house.
Centerville has been a Preserve America Community since January 2005, a designation made by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is a federal agency. Under that programme the city publishes a walking tour booklet with photographs and maps covering twenty five historic homes, and its Historic Sites Committee sells a map and postcards of the historic sites. The council's profile also mentions an expanded edition of the booklet in development, and that language may be a decade old, so ask the city what is currently in print rather than turning up expecting one. The council publishes the designation.
What a National Register listing actually means is worth stating plainly, because it is one of the most misunderstood things in residential property. A listing is an honour and a record. It does not open the house to the public, it does not oblige an owner to admit anyone, and on its own it does not stop an owner altering or even demolishing a privately owned building with private money. What it can do is make certain tax provisions available and trigger review where federal money or a federal permit is involved. If any of that matters to a specific purchase, the state historic preservation office is the body to ask, and a Centerville listing is a reason to ask rather than an answer.
The one thing this page will not do, having read the whole nomination, is describe the people. The document carries a long section on nineteenth century plural marriage in this community, with percentages attached. That is a historian's subject and it has no business on a page about buying a house, because describing a place is the job and characterising the households in it is not. What is fair game, and what this page has used, is the buildings, the materials, the builders, the dates and the street layout.
A last practical note. The town grid the nomination describes is not a pure grid. Twenty residential blocks were laid out around a central church block, and then the town also grew linearly along Main Street with farmsteads outside the core, so Centerville is as much a line as it is a square. That is still exactly how it reads on the ground, and it is why the old part of this town feels longer and thinner than a Utah pioneer plat usually does. The rest of what a Centerville address asks for is on the moving here page.
Two blocks north
William R. Smith Park
The park named for the co-op's first president, with a pioneer monument in it and forty parking stalls.
Read the guideOnce a year
The Freedom Festival
The parade runs the whole length of this street on 4 July, from 1450 North Main down to Pages Lane.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Centerville
What an address in the old grid asks for, from utility rates to the zoning text amendment out for comment.
The mover pageUp the hill
Deuel Creek
The canyon that supplied the flour mill, the sawmill and the surname on three of these listings.
Read the guideDays out
Family weekends in Davis County
The county's museums and paid attractions, with what they cost and when they open.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Centerville city guide
Prices, taxes, providers and drive times for the old grid and the rest of the town.
Open the guideKeep reading
More of Centerville on The Local.
The creek canyon
Deuel Creek
Two dirt trailheads half a mile apart, a dozen log bridges, and a fall past the swing.
Read the guideThe dry slope
Parrish Canyon
A 0.85 mile walk, a 1.95 mile sunset loop, or a thousand feet up to the crest road.
Read the guideTwo names
William R. Smith Park
Forty stalls, a century of shade, and a monument that starts its story in 1848.
Read the guideThree days
The Freedom Festival
Three dates, two parade routes, a flyover at 8:38, and a ban running the same month.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Centerville
Wood water pipes in 1915, two irrigation systems, and a fire line in street names.
Read the guideThe companion
Centerville, in full
The town named for sitting in the middle, and the water it incorporated itself to go and get.
Read the pageQuick answers
Historic Centerville, answered.
Yes, at 186 East Center Street, and it is a private residence. The multiple property nomination accepted by the National Park Service for this town records that William Reeves built a Wells Fargo livery stable in 1866 and converted it into an amusement hall called Elkhorn Hall once the railroad was finished, and that the building was in use as a residence in 1997. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation says the same, describing the 1866 stagecoach station as still in use today as a residence. A Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker, number 120, erected in 1948, stands on the street outside.
No, and that surprises people. It does not appear among Centerville's twenty six listed properties, even though three listed houses sit on the same stretch of Center Street: the Thomas and Margaret Brandon House at 185 East Center, the Harris Tingey House at 269 East Center, and the Smith Larsen House at 280 East Center. What it carries instead is a 1948 Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker. A 1948 marker to an 1866 building is itself seventy eight years old, which is its own small piece of history.
Twenty six are individually listed, and one more was listed and later removed. Fourteen of the twenty six went on together on 17 November 1997, which is the signature of a thematic nomination, and that nomination is titled Historic Resources of Centerville, Utah. The earliest listing is the Melvin Harley Randall House on Porter Lane, listed 20 June 1980, and the most recent is the Leroy and Alice Cheney House at 676 North Main, listed 12 July 2021. The Young Men's Hall and Tingey House at 85 South 300 East was removed from the Register on 15 June 2015.
There is no National Register historic district in Centerville. There are twenty six individual listings and one delisting. This matters more than it sounds, because references to a historic Deuel Creek district circulate locally, including on this site's own practical city guide, and the phrase was not found anywhere on the city's current website. What does exist is the federal Preserve America designation the city received in January 2005, a city walking tour booklet covering twenty five historic homes, and the 1997 nomination that frames the listings.
Charles Duncan and his three sons, John, Charles and Archibald. The federal nomination states that Charles Duncan and Sons were responsible for building most of the rock homes in Centerville and most of the early rock buildings and culverts in south Davis County, and that the family's masonry work spanned 1853 to 1891. Charles also spent years cutting stone for the Salt Lake City temple during its construction between 1863 and 1867. There is a John, Harriet, and Eliza Jennett Duncan House at 445 North 400 East on the National Register.
By the corners. The nomination records that a trademark of the stone homes the Duncans built is the use of primarily granite or sandstone for the quoins, the dressed corner stones, and that Duncan used pieces of stone discarded during the building of the Salt Lake City temple for ornamentation. The walls themselves are local rock, probably gathered from dry creek beds and the bench above the town, most often laid in a random ashlar pattern with beaded joints. So a rough local wall finished with regular, finer, dressed corner blocks is the signature, and the corner blocks may be temple offcuts.
The city museum, housed in the Whitaker House at 168 North Main Street, directly south of City Hall. The building is on the National Register in its own right, listed 28 March 1996, and the city bought it on 1 December 1994. Hours are narrow: Tuesday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Thursday from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., closed the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. Inside are artifacts from the 1800s, historic videos, a women's history exhibit, a pop up museum and hands on displays about the building's architecture. No admission price is published.
The early 1860s, and it is worth refusing to be more precise than that. The city's museum page and a newspaper account of the house both point to about 1862, when Thomas Whitaker commissioned Charles Duncan to build a one and a half story field stone house using stone off his own property, four years after the Whitakers settled in Centerville in 1858. A federal profile describes the museum as being in an 1866 house. Do not print 1866 for the Whitaker House: 1866 is the year of the Wells Fargo building two blocks away on Center Street.
Only from the pavement, with one exception. The twenty six National Register properties and the twenty five houses on the city's walking tour booklet are private homes, and a Register listing places no obligation on an owner to admit anybody. The exception is the Heritage Museum, which is a city facility inside a listed house and is open two days a week. The Historic Sites Committee sells a map and postcards of the historic sites, and the walking tour booklet is the city's own publication, so ask the city what is currently in print before planning around it.
Twenty six listings, one mason, and a street you can read once somebody shows you how.
Most towns this size have a plaque and a story. Centerville has twenty six federal listings, a nomination that names the builder of most of its stone houses, a federal preservation designation from 2005, and a surviving 1866 commercial building that somebody lives in. If a house in the old grid is what you are weighing, the questions are specific ones: what the listing does and does not restrict, what the state historic preservation office would say about a planned alteration, and what a hundred and sixty year old rock wall means for an inspection. Tell me what you are looking at and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works this town, 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.