The Freeport Center Clearfield
A giant warehouse district on the west side, named after a tax law
The Freeport Center, and the naval depot that is still standing underneath it
On the west side of Clearfield sits a giant private warehouse and distribution district, about 680 acres of it, leased to dozens of companies. It is the Freeport Center, and it is what is left of a naval supply depot the Navy built here during the Second World War, one of the largest in the world at its peak. The Navy left in 1962, a 1963 tax law gave the place its odd name, and the buildings have been leased ever since. Here is what it is, what came before it, and what is inside it now.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
The Freeport Center is a large private warehouse and distribution district on the west side of Clearfield, about 680 acres of it, leased to dozens of companies for manufacturing, warehousing and shipping. It began as a United States naval supply depot built here during the Second World War, and after the Navy left in 1962 it was sold off and named for a 1963 tax law on stored goods. It is not a place to visit: there is no museum, no visitor center and nothing open, and most people drive the public roads through it without realizing what it is. If you are weighing a west side address, what matters is that it is working freight ground that runs on the working week, right behind a lot of ordinary streets.
What it is today
A working warehouse district that most people drive past without registering
The Freeport Center is a private industrial district on the west side of the city, west of State Street and reached from 700 South and 1000 West. From the road it looks like ordinary warehousing, and the one thing that makes it worth twenty minutes is the address system. The buildings are not numbered along streets. They carry letter and number designations, and that grid is the Navy's, laid out in 1943 and still in use, so a company might sit at D-12 or E-16 or J-5 rather than at a street number. The operator describes the district in a sentence that is eighty years old in substance: railroad loading docks on one side of each warehouse, truck docks on the other, and overhead cranes inside 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 tax, and the district is named for its tax status. Utah passed the freeport legislation in 1963, the year the property was sold, and it is the reason a warehouse district on a Utah sand ridge became a distribution hub for the western states rather than just storage. The operator still describes the same advantage today: no inventory tax is assessed on goods stored within the state.
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. It is the largest single employer inside the city limits, a technical college teaches trades from a building in it, and the State of Utah keeps its own records center in a converted wartime warehouse here, but none of that is open to look around. What there is to see is the freight itself and the grid the Navy drew.
Before you drive it
- It is a working freight district, not a heritage site. Trucks and rail cars have the right of way on the internal roads, and the traffic pattern is built around loading docks, not visitors.
- Nothing is open to the public. There is no display, plaque or visitor point anywhere in the district.
- The letter blocks are the surviving Navy layout. If you want one thing to look at, look at how many buildings have a rail dock on one long side and a truck dock on the other.
- Photograph the streets rather than the yards. Several tenants are contract manufacturers and their sites are posted accordingly.
The district, then and now
680
acres today, per the Utah State Archives
1943
the year the Navy commissioned the depot
84
large warehouses the Navy built here
38 mi
of railroad track laid inside the fence by 1943
The depot underneath
Eleven months of building, and for a while the largest naval supply depot in the world
In 1942 the Navy went looking for a place to store and move supplies for the Pacific war, somewhere safe from attack but fast to reach the coast. Clearfield fit for reasons that read like a summary of the whole idea: roughly equidistant from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, sitting on two major western railroads and three transcontinental highways, two miles from military air transport at the Ogden Air Depot, on firm level ground that kept construction cheap and in air dry enough to store materiel for years without it rotting. The Navy had already turned down sites in Washington, Nevada and California as too far north, too poorly connected or too close to the coast. Clearfield was chosen in 1942 and the depot was commissioned on 10 April 1943.
What went up in those months was enormous. The Navy bought roughly 841 acres of farm ground and built 84 large storage buildings on it, more than eight million square feet under roof and about as much open storage again. Most of the warehouses were built to one pattern, a long shed with a rail dock down one side and truck doors down the other, and about a third of them were heated, with nineteen fitted with dehumidification plants to hold delicate goods in controlled air. Forty miles of railroad track ran inside the fence. It was one of only three inland naval supply depots in the country, the others at Great Lakes, Illinois, and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. When it was commissioned it was the second largest naval supply depot in the world, and by the end of the war it had grown into the largest.
The people were the hard part. At its 1944 peak the depot employed 7,624, about 6,034 civilians and 1,590 military, the largest workforce this city has ever held inside one fence. It could not be filled locally, so it issued an open call for anyone willing to work, ran buses from Salt Lake City from November 1943, and the government built cinder block housing called Anchorage Acres beside the installation because there was nowhere for the workers to live. The wartime workforce included the WAVES, the Navy's women's reserve, and later prisoners of war assigned to the depot. By 1962 the count was down to a few hundred as the Navy wound the place down.
What it moved
Thirty thousand rail cars in a single year, and a room that sent a lost sailor's belongings home
The first thing the depot ever took in for storage, in December 1942, was a carload of safes, and the first thing it shipped out, in January 1943, was a one ton safe bound for a naval ammunition depot in Nebraska. By that summer every storehouse was allocated and the place was working at capacity. The scale in the peak year is hard to hold in your head, so here it is plainly: in 1944 the depot received 30,696 rail cars of materiel and shipped out nearly 16,000, and by 1945 more than 500,000 different items were stored here, worth more than the entire assessed property value of the state of Utah at the time.
Two details from that work are worth carrying because almost nobody repeats them. The depot pioneered a way of packing a whole job into one shipment, a single load carrying more than 5,500 basic items assembled for one destination, so that a complete thousand bed hospital or a weapons repair shop could be sent as a unit, sometimes filling a hundred car freight train. And quieter than that: the depot was the Navy's depository for the personal effects of sailors, Coast Guardsmen and Marines lost in action, and part of its job was to sort those belongings and send them to the next of kin. A warehouse district on a Utah sand ridge did that work for four years. There was even a department that shipped no supplies at all, mailing musical instruments, records and sheet music to installations anywhere from a catalog run out of Clearfield.
Who is there now
The Navy left, a tax law passed, and the buildings never emptied
The Navy announced the closure in 1961 and handed the property over in 1962, but the buildings never sat empty, because private tenants had been renting warehouse space here since 1959. Some were not storing anything at all: Hercules and Sperry were building subassemblies for Minuteman and Sergeant missiles inside the warehouses before the Navy had even gone. When the government offered part of the ground for sale, the chambers of commerce of Salt Lake and Davis counties pushed to buy it as a block and run it as one distribution center, and whether that could pay came down to state tax policy. The 1963 freeport legislation settled it, the winning bid came from a surgical supply company out of Oakland, California, and that is where the district and its name come from.
What sits there now is the same buildings doing the same kind of work for different people. Dozens of national and local companies lease space for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, and the roster changes constantly, so any list is a snapshot. Longtime tenants have included Lifetime Products and Utility Trailer, both named by the Utah State Archives, and the district has housed aerospace and defense work over the years, including space shuttle booster refurbishment. Davis Technical College runs a training site inside it, and Utah keeps its own inactive records in an 80,000 square foot records center that opened here in 2012. For the current tenant list, the operator publishes a directory building by building.
This is private, working industrial ground, not a place to visit. There is no visitor center, no display and nothing open, and the yards behind the loading docks are private property belonging to individual tenants, several of them contract manufacturers with posted sites. You can drive the public roads through it, and that is the whole of what is open to you.
Living near it
A freight rhythm on the other side of a residential street
For anybody weighing an address on the west side of the city, the practical version is short: the district works on the working week. What you are living next to is rail and truck movement, a steady flow of heavy vehicles at shift changes and dock times rather than one loud event, and it has been there since 1943 with no scenario in which it stops. If a west side street 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 concrete. It is the largest single employer inside the city limits, it is why a technical college teaches trades from a building on the west side, and it is the reason the city's tax base is not purely residential. Very few cities of thirty thousand people have a seven million square foot industrial base inside the boundary. Two of the city's own culinary water wells are even named Freeport Well 1 and Freeport Well 2, which is about as literally as a place can be woven into a city.
The base on the other side of the city is a separate subject with its own set of facts, and the commute, the gates, the employment footprint and the jet noise are all written once for the whole county on the Hill Air Force Base page. If you are deciding between this end of the bench and the next town over, the Clearfield or Layton comparison carries the bills, the districts and the water, and the Clearfield city guide carries what sells on these streets.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Quick answers
The Freeport Center, answered
A giant private warehouse and distribution district of about 680 acres on the west side of Clearfield, built during the Second World War as the United States Naval Supply Depot Clearfield and sold into private hands after the Navy left in 1962. The operator describes it as scores of warehouses over more than seven million square feet, leased to dozens of national and local companies for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution. It is working industrial ground with no public function: no visitor center, no museum 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 tax, and the district is named for that status. Utah passed the freeport legislation in 1963, which made it far more attractive to store and distribute goods from Clearfield across the western states, and the operator still describes the same advantage today: no inventory tax is assessed on goods stored within the state.
The Navy chose the Clearfield site in 1942 and built the depot through that year, commissioning the United States Naval Supply Depot Clearfield on 10 April 1943. It was one of only three inland naval supply depots in the country, the others being at Great Lakes, Illinois, and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. The depot handled naval supplies through the Second World War, closed in 1962 as the Navy consolidated, and the private district that leases the buildings today sits on the same ground doing the same kind of work for different companies.
Bigger. At its wartime peak the Navy held roughly 841 acres here, carrying 84 large storage buildings with more than eight million square feet of covered storage and about as much open storage again. The Freeport Center today is about 680 acres. Those are two different measurements of two different footprints at two different times, so the wartime 841 and the present-day 680 should not be read as the same thing. Some of the depot ground went elsewhere when it was broken up.
It was the second largest naval supply depot in the world when it was commissioned in 1943, and by the end of the Second World War it had grown into the largest. What made the site valuable for storage was the dry Utah air, which let goods sit for years with very little deterioration.
At its wartime peak in 1944 the depot employed 7,624 people, about 6,034 civilians and 1,590 military, the largest workforce this city has ever held inside one fence. It could not be staffed locally, so it issued an open call for workers, ran buses from Salt Lake City starting in November 1943, and the government built cinder block housing called Anchorage Acres beside it. By 1962 the workforce was down to a few hundred as the depot wound toward closure.
For a combination of distance and connections. The site was relatively safe from attack, roughly equidistant from the ports of Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, close to two major western railroads and three transcontinental highways, and two miles from military air transport at the Ogden Air Depot. The gentle slope and firm ground kept construction cheap, and the dry climate let materiel sit in storage for years. The Navy had already turned down sites in Washington, Nevada and California as too far north, too poorly connected or too close to the coast.
Dozens of national and local companies lease space for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, and the roster changes constantly. Longtime tenants have included Lifetime Products and Utility Trailer, both named by the Utah State Archives, and the district has housed aerospace and defense work over the years. Davis Technical College runs a training site inside it, and the State of Utah keeps its own records center in a converted wartime warehouse here. For the current list, the operator publishes a tenant directory building by building.
You can drive the public roads through it, and that is all. There is no museum, no visitor center, no interpretive display and no public building to enter anywhere in the district. It is working freight and manufacturing ground where trucks and rail cars have the right of way, and the yards behind the loading docks are private property belonging to individual tenants, several of them contract manufacturers with posted sites. If you go, the one thing worth looking at is the letter and number grid the Navy laid out, which the buildings still carry.
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, 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.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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