The depot Clearfield
A tax term, not a place name, on 680 acres the Navy bought from 43 farmers
The Freeport Center, and the naval depot that is still standing underneath it.
In May 1942 the President authorised the Navy to buy 841 acres of Clearfield farm ground for $750,000. Eleven months later it commissioned a supply depot there with 84 storage buildings, more than 8.3 million square feet under roof, 38 miles of railroad track inside the fence and a peak workforce of 7,624. The Navy left in 1962, the Utah Legislature passed a tax law in 1963, a surgical supply company from Oakland put in the winning bid, and the buildings have been leased ever since. This is what was built, what it held, and what is in it now.
I work Southern Utah, four hours and a mountain range away from the north end of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own parks, aquatic, public works and development pages at clearfield.city, its August 2026 newsletter, its 2024 water use filing with the state, the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service on the naval depot, the Utah Historical Quarterly account written the year the depot was sold, the codified state highway definition at le.utah.gov, the Freeport Center operator's own tenant directory, the North Davis Sewer District and the presidential remarks of January 1967. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
What is the Freeport Center, and can you go and look at it?
It is a private industrial district of 680 acres on the west side of Clearfield, and it is the physical remains of a naval supply depot the United States Navy built here in eleven months during 1942 and 1943. You can drive the public roads through it and most people do without noticing, because it looks like ordinary warehousing. What makes it worth twenty minutes is the address system. The buildings are not numbered along streets; they carry letter and number designations, and the operator's own tenant directory, checked in August 2026, lists tenants at A-13, C-14, D-12, E-16, F-9, G-8, H-11, J-5, K-12, M-7, N-7 South, Y-15 and Z-13. That grid is the Navy's.
It is not a visitor site and nothing here is set up for one. There is no museum, no interpretive panel, no tour and no public building open to walk into. What there is, on the operator's own about page read the same day, is 78 buildings holding more than 7,000,000 square feet, ranging from 4,000 to 400,000 square feet each, with a further 60 plus acres designated for growth, more than 70 national and local companies and over 7,000 employees. The operator also describes the buildings in a sentence that is eighty years old in substance: railroad loading docks on one side and truck loading facilities on the other, with 10 or 25 ton overhead cranes in many of them.
The name is the best small fact about the place and almost nobody knows it. Freeport is not a person and not a place. A free port is a tax term for a zone where stored goods are exempt from inventory taxation, and the district is named for its tax status. The 1963 editor's note appended to the Utah Historical Quarterly account of the depot records that by action of the 1963 Utah Legislature a favourable taxing procedure popularly known as the freeport legislation had made it all the more likely that Clearfield would serve as a distribution centre for the western states. The operator still explains the advantage the same way today: no inventory taxes are assessed on any inventory stored within the state.
The district, in numbers
680
acres, per the Utah State Archives and the operator
78
buildings, on the operator's own about page
53
tenants published in the operator's directory
38 mi
of railroad track laid inside the fence by 1943
The work
Half a million different items, thirty thousand carloads in one year, and a department that posted musical instruments to the Pacific.
The first thing the depot ever received for storage arrived on 21 December 1942 and it was a carload of safes. The first thing it shipped out went on 6 January 1943 and it was a one ton safe, sent to the naval ammunition depot at Hastings, Nebraska. By 1 May 1943 it had taken in 1,253 carloads and sent out 51. By July of that year every storehouse was allocated and the place was working at capacity, which took four months. The 1963 account is the only document that carries this sequence and it took it from the depot's own command history.
The scale in the peak year is difficult to hold in your head, so here it is in the article's own figures. During 1944 the depot received 30,696 carloads of materiel, representing 2,609,160 tons, and shipped 15,942 carloads representing 1,355,070 tons. Internal movement inside the fence, which is not in either of those numbers, ran to roughly 21,000 carloads in the year to 30 June 1945. The busiest single month was September 1944, with 4,108 full freight carloads turned over. By June 1945 more than 500,000 different items were stored here with a value above $580 million, which the article notes was nearly three times the total assessed property valuation of the entire state of Utah in 1944.
Two details from that work are worth carrying because nobody repeats them. The first is the Triple-B, the basic boxed base load, a concept the article credits to Clearfield: a single load assembled for one prearranged destination and one job, carrying over 5,500 basic items, so that a complete thousand bed hospital unit or a weapons repair depot could be shipped as a unit. Some of those loads filled hundred car freight trains. The second is quieter. The depot was the Navy's depository for the personal effects of Navy, Coast Guard and Marine personnel who were lost in action or otherwise separated from their property, and its job was to sort and inspect those effects and send them to the next of kin. A warehouse district on a Utah sand ridge did that work for four years.
There was also a department that sold nothing and shipped a great deal. The Instrument Supply Facility, part of the Navy's welfare and recreation programme, let installations anywhere order musical instruments, phonograph records and sheet music from Clearfield through a catalogue the article compares to a Sears Roebuck one. It was, the historical record says, one of the fastest moving departments on the base.
Who did the work, in the words of the record and no further
The depot could not be staffed locally and did not pretend otherwise. Administrative officials issued an open call for anyone willing to work, and the command history recorded the response: elderly men, mothers, war wives, girls fresh from college, high school boys who worked after school and during the summer, and local farmers who worked swing shifts, night shifts and the winter months. Whole families came, and additional staff were recruited from other parts of the country once local sources were exhausted. A bus service between Salt Lake City and the base began in November 1943 to encourage commuting, and the government built cinder block housing called Anchorage Acres beside the installation because there was nowhere for people to live.
The two bodies that publish this history disagree about two groups and both versions are recorded here rather than merged. The Utah State Archives records that the workforce included WAVES, the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, from July 1942, and Italian prisoners of war from November 1943. The 1963 Utah Historical Quarterly account records instead that 300 WAVES arrived early in 1944 and could not be housed, living successively at the Ogden Arsenal, at Hill Field and at Fort Douglas until February 1945, and that 500 German prisoners of war were assigned to the depot in April 1945, with the quonset huts that had housed a contractor camp converted into a compound. That compound was deactivated on 12 April 1946 and the remaining WAVES were detached the same month. Two issuing accounts, two different pictures, and the honest thing is to name both.
Thirty thousand carloads in, sixteen thousand out, half a million different items on the racks, and a room whose job was to send a dead sailor's belongings home.
The name
The Navy left in 1962, the Legislature passed a tax law in 1963, and a surgical supply company from Oakland bought the place.
The end was announced in a Navy directive of May 1961 and attributed, in the Navy's own framing, to rising costs in men and materials along with evolutionary changes in weapons, as part of a general economy programme. It was not the only one: a similar depot at Spokane closed and was sold to private industry in the autumn of 1959, and another at Hastings, Nebraska, closed in the spring of 1960. Deactivation at Clearfield was originally scheduled for July 1964, but when it became clear that moving faster would encourage missile contractors and other firms to take the buildings, the facilities were transferred to the General Services Administration on 30 June 1962. At that point the physical plant was valued at $28,798,000 and the warehouses still held an inventory worth $430 million.
The tenants had in fact started arriving three years before the Navy left, which is the part of the story that explains why the buildings never emptied. From 1959 the depot rented space to Advanced Cybernetics, Happy Homes, Thiokol Chemical Corporation, Sperry Utah Company, Hercules Powder Company, Western Affiliated Engineering, Snarr Advertising Company and the United States Geological Survey, and from 1961 part of it served as a Civil Defense Mobilization Depot. The two largest renters when the closure order came were Westinghouse and the California Packing Corporation. Hercules and Sperry were not storing things: they were manufacturing subassemblies for the Minuteman and Sergeant missiles inside the warehouses. In 1961 the private companies and government agencies in the depot paid roughly $1 million for the use of it.
Then the tax law. The General Services Administration said it would declare about half the land area surplus and sell it, probably in February 1963, and the chambers of commerce of Salt Lake and Davis counties began a drive to buy that half as a unit and lease it as a single distribution centre. Whether that would pay depended, the 1963 article says plainly, on state taxing policy. The editor added a note that year recording the answer: the 1963 Utah Legislature passed the procedure popularly known as the freeport legislation, and the highest bid for the portion offered for sale, more than $5 million, came from the Shumacher Surgical Supply Company of Oakland, California. That is where the district and its name come from, and it is on no listicle in the state.
What sits there now is the same buildings doing the same kind of work for different people. The Utah State Archives names Lifetime Products, Utility Trailer, Honeywell and Del Monte among the tenants and records that NASA space shuttle booster refurbishment happened here too. The operator's current directory, checked in August 2026, publishes 53 entries, among them Lifetime Products at D-12 with Lifetime Metals across H-3, H-4 and H-9, Utility Trailer at E-14 and N-14, Northrop Propulsion Systems at C-14 and Northrop Space Systems across four more buildings, Leggett and Platt at G-10, Univar Solutions at K-12, Western Zirconium at J-5, Smith Sport Optics at F-13, Rock Exotica at the south end of E-16, the United States Postal Service at Y-13 and the Union Pacific Railroad at G-15. Honeywell and Del Monte are not on the current list. Tenant rosters in a 78 building district move constantly, which is why this one carries the date it was checked.
Every present tense figure for this district comes from the company that leases it, and the district is private ground with no public function at all. The 680 acres are corroborated at the Utah State Archives, and the 78 buildings, the seven million square feet, the seventy plus companies and the seven thousand employees are the operator's own published figures on its about page, checked in August 2026. They are not audited, they are not dated on the page they appear on, and the tenant directory carries no total of its own. The same page describes the district as the number one facility in the Intermountain West and the western United States, which is marketing copy about itself and is not repeated here as a finding. Separately, none of this is somewhere to take a family on a Saturday: there is no visitor centre, no display, no tour and nothing open, and the yards behind the docks are private property belonging to contract manufacturers.
Living with it
Seven thousand jobs and a freight rhythm on the other side of a residential street.
The practical version, for anybody weighing an address on the west side of this city, is that the district works on the working week. Rail movements and truck movements are the thing to understand rather than any single noise event, because a warehouse district generates a steady flow of heavy vehicles at shift changes and at dock times rather than a peak. That flow has been there since 1943, the internal rail was laid in the same year, and there is no scenario in which it stops. If a street on the west side is on your list, drive it on a Tuesday morning and again on a Sunday and the difference will tell you more than any description.
What the district gives back is also concrete. It is the largest single employer inside the city limits, it is why a technical college teaches trades from Building D-5, and it is why the state's own inactive records live in a converted wartime warehouse rather than in a purpose built archive. Very few cities of thirty thousand people have a seven million square foot industrial base inside the boundary, and it is the reason the city's tax base is not purely residential.
What this page will not do is describe the installation on the other side of the city, because that is a different subject with a different set of published facts and it is written once for the whole county. The employment footprint, the commute, the gates and the noise contours are all on the county page, which also carries the Freeport in a single paragraph as the earlier federal presence. This page is the house level version of that paragraph and it stops at the city limit in both directions.
One last thing about the ground itself. The 841 acres the Navy bought in 1942 came out of about 1,600 acres of working farmland belonging to 43 households, and the crops standing on it in the spring of that year could not be harvested because construction started first. The city that exists now sits on both sides of that transaction: the housing grid that filled in for the workforce, and the district that still occupies the land. The mover page carries what the rest of an address here asks for.
The other side
Hill Air Force Base
The installation as a place and an economy, written once for all fifteen cities in the county.
Read the guideThe road out
The Bernard Fisher Highway
SR-193, exit 334, and the airman whose gravel paper route turned into a named state highway.
Read the guideThe new ground
Clearfield Station
What a city does about a missing centre when it owns no historic core to restore.
Read the guideMoving here
Clearfield or Layton
One municipal bill, a sewer district of eight cities, and irrigation water the city does not supply.
The mover pageThe practical side
The Clearfield city guide
The half of an address that carries figures: what sells on these streets and who sends the bills.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Fifteen towns along one bench and the seven subjects written once for all of them.
The region hubKeep reading
More of Clearfield on The Local.
The road
The Bernard Fisher Highway
A boy's gravel paper route became a state highway named for him after 1967.
Read the guideThe downtown
Clearfield Station
The city that never had a downtown is buying one, 28 million dollars of pipe first.
Read the guideThe pool
The Aquatic Center
The voters said no to the tax, and the council found another instrument entirely.
Read the guideThe courts
Steed Park
Two parks of 11.5 acres each, sixteen lit courts, and a curfew at midnight.
Read the guideThe park
Fisher Park
Sixteen acres, a 14,000 square foot skate park, and the town's one big night.
Read the guideMoving here
Clearfield or Layton
One bill, one sewer district, no irrigation water, and a grid that runs into Sunset.
Read the guideThe companion
Clearfield, in full
Two federal installations, no historic main street, and a downtown going in beside the platform.
Read the pageQuick answers
The Freeport Center, answered.
A private industrial district of 680 acres on the west side of Clearfield, built as the United States Naval Supply Depot Clearfield and privatised after the Navy left in 1962. The operator's own about page, checked in August 2026, publishes 78 buildings holding more than 7,000,000 square feet, individual buildings from 4,000 to 400,000 square feet, a further 60 plus acres designated for growth, more than 70 national and local companies and over 7,000 employees. Its tenant directory published 53 entries at the same check. It is working industrial ground with no public function, no visitor centre and nothing open to look around.
Because of a tax law passed the year it was sold. A free port is a customs and tax term for a zone where stored goods are exempt from inventory taxation. The editor's note appended to the Utah Historical Quarterly's 1963 article on the depot records that by action of the 1963 Utah Legislature a favourable taxing procedure popularly known as the freeport legislation had made it far more likely that Clearfield would serve as a distribution centre for the western states. The operator still describes the same advantage on its own site: no inventory taxes are assessed on any inventory stored within the state.
Construction ran from mid June 1942 to 10 April 1943, when the depot was officially commissioned with Captain Omar D. Conger installed as its first commander. The Secretary of the Navy chose Clearfield as the site on 11 April 1942 according to the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service, and the President authorised the acquisition on 26 May 1942 according to the Utah Historical Quarterly. Captain Raymond V. Miller arrived on 3 June 1942 to begin construction, working out of the Hotel Ben Lomond and then a Clearfield elementary school until the administration building was ready in November 1942.
Bigger. The Utah Historical Quarterly records 841 acres acquired for $750,000 out of roughly 1,600 acres of farmland worked by 43 farmers, carrying 84 large storage buildings with more than 8.3 million square feet of covered storage and a further 8 million square feet of open storage. The Utah State Archives and the current operator both give the Freeport Center today as 680 acres. Those are two different measurements of two different things at two different times, so 841 and 680 should never be printed as though they describe the same footprint. Some of the depot ground went elsewhere at disposal.
The Utah Division of Archives and Records Service publishes it in two steps and that is the version worth using: it was the second largest Naval Supply Depot in the world when commissioned, and by the end of the Second World War it had become the largest. That is a state agency making the claim rather than an event or an operator marketing itself, which is why it appears here at all. The Utah Historical Quarterly account of the depot does not use those words, and it does record that Clearfield was one of only three inland naval supply depots in the country, the others being at Great Lakes, Illinois, and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Peak employment was 7,624 in 1944, made up of 6,034 civilian and 1,590 military personnel, as a yearly average from data furnished by the depot itself and published in the Utah Historical Quarterly of Spring 1963. The same table runs from 144 people in 1942 to 435 on 1 June 1962. Staffing was a genuine problem: the depot could not be filled locally, so it issued an open call for anyone willing to work, ran bus services from Salt Lake City from November 1943, and the government built cinder block housing called Anchorage Acres beside the installation.
For a combination of distance and connections. The site was relatively secure from attack, roughly equidistant from the ports of Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, near the gateways of two major western railways and three transcontinental highways, and two miles from military air transport at the Ogden Air Depot. The gentle slope and firm ground were considered money saving by naval construction experts, and the dry climate allowed long term storage with minimal deterioration. The Navy had already rejected Pasco in Washington as too far north, Winnemucca in Nevada for insufficient transportation and Sacramento in California as too close to the coast.
The operator's own tenant directory, checked in August 2026, published 53 entries with building designations. They include Lifetime Products at Building D-12 and Lifetime Metals across H-3, H-4 and H-9, Utility Trailer at E-14 and N-14, Northrop Propulsion Systems at C-14 and Northrop Space Systems across four buildings, Leggett and Platt at G-10, Univar Solutions at K-12, Western Zirconium at J-5, Smith Sport Optics at F-13, Rock Exotica at the south end of E-16, the United States Postal Service at Y-13 and the Union Pacific Railroad at G-15. Davis Technical College publishes a location at Building D-5. Tenant lists in a 78 building district change constantly.
You can drive the public roads through it and that is all. There is no museum, no visitor centre, no interpretive display, no tour and no public building to enter anywhere in the district. It is working freight and manufacturing ground where trucks and rail cars have priority, and the yards behind the loading docks are private property belonging to individual tenants, several of them contract manufacturers with posted sites. Twenty minutes of driving the internal roads will show you the letter and number building grid the Navy laid out, which is the one thing worth going for.
A warehouse district that has been doing the same job since 1943.
Most people move to this city without ever learning what the buildings on the west side are, and it matters more than it sounds. It is the largest employer inside the city limits, it moves freight by rail and by road on the working week, it is the reason two of the city's own wells are named after it, and it sits immediately behind a lot of ordinary residential streets. If a west side address is on your list, drive the district once on a weekday morning and once on a Sunday before you decide anything. Tell me which streets you are weighing and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who knows this end of the county, 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.