The first name Farmington
The county seat spent its first five years answering to a different name
North Cottonwood, and the wall that was never finished but drew the town anyway.
Hector Haight was sent to winter cattle herds on North Cottonwood Creek in 1847. In 1852 the Utah Territorial Legislature created Davis County, seated it here and renamed the settlement Farmington. The town was surveyed the following year onto a bench wide enough for exactly two city blocks, then walled in an L shape that was never finished and had disappeared by the end of the 1860s. The city did not actually incorporate until December 1892, with 1,180 residents, which is forty years after the date most sources give.
I work Southern Utah, a long way south of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. The spine of this set is federal: five National Park Service registration forms were pulled and read in full, for the two historic districts and for three Lagoon rides. The rest was read at the body that issues it, meaning Farmington City, Davis County, UDOT project records, the Utah Transit Authority, the Division of Wildlife Resources, the Census Bureau's own data files and the park's own calendar. Each figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent handles the work on the ground.
The live question
What was Farmington called before it was called Farmington?
North Cottonwood, after the creek that comes out of the canyon above the town. Farmington City's own history page carries the original name, and the Clark Lane National Register nomination independently records that Hector C. Haight, the settler the town treats as its founder, camped on North Cottonwood Creek near what is now Farmington City. The name lasted about five years, from the first winter of 1847 to the territorial act of 1852, and it has quietly come back: the city's newest park, North Cottonwood Commons at 550 Innovator Drive on the far west side, carries the oldest name in town.
The 1852 act is the thing that gets misdated, and the misdating is on this site's own practical city guide in three places. In 1852 the Utah Territorial Legislature created Davis County, placed the county seat at North Cottonwood and renamed it Farmington. That is a naming and a seat, not an incorporation. The incorporation came forty years later: Farmington City's history page states that in December of 1892, Farmington was incorporated as a city with a population of 1,180, and the National Register nomination for the Main Street district states independently that the town of Farmington incorporated in 1892 with a population of 1,180. Two issuing bodies, the same year, the same number.
What makes this worth a page rather than a footnote is that everything else about the founding is documented to the same standard. There is a surveyed plat with a lot count and a street width. There is a fortification wall with a footprint in modern street names and a specification in feet. There is a population series that starts at 1,180 and can be followed to 26,163 without leaving federal and municipal sources. That is an unusually complete record for a Utah town of this size, and almost none of it is in circulation.
The founding, in numbers
1847
the winter Hector Haight was sent to keep cattle on North Cottonwood Creek
1852
the year the county was created, seated here, and the settlement renamed
1,180
the population when the city actually incorporated, in December 1892
1,951
the population still, at the 1960 census, before everything changed
The wall
An L shaped mud wall two blocks wide, never finished, never gated, and gone inside fifteen years.
This is the best single fact about the shape of old Farmington and it took two federal documents to recover it. The Main Street registration form carries the footprint: in response to Brigham Young's fortification order, in 1854 and 1855 the settlers of Farmington began to erect a mud wall for fortification enclosing the town in an L shape, two blocks wide, covering Main and 100 East Streets, extending from almost 100 South to 500 North with an extension to the west along what is now State Street. The form adds that much of the Main Street Historic District sits inside those boundaries. So the wall is not an abstraction. It is a set of streets you can drive today.
The Clark Lane form, written seventeen years earlier for the other district, carries the specification and the ending. As planned the wall was to be ten feet high, four feet thick at the bottom and two and a half feet thick at the top, with seven entrances, enclosing a plot two blocks east to west by about six blocks north to south. Those plans were altered to add three and a half blocks on the western extension of the bench, which is what produced the L. The reason for the western arm is the terrain: that ground sits on a knoll with steep drops to the north and west, so a wall placed there had unobstructed views over the surrounding country.
Then it simply stopped. The wall reached about six feet by 1855 and was never completed as conceived. The seven planned entrances were left open and their gates were never hung. By the end of the 1860s residents had begun leveling out the dirt humps in their own lots, and the wall disappeared except for a few scattered fragments. Nothing of it survives today. A defensive work that was never finished, never closed and never used is nonetheless the most accurate map of the original town anyone has, because the blocks it was drawn around are the blocks that are still there.
The survey that preceded it is equally specific. A town plot was surveyed in the autumn of 1853. The surveyors located the village on a bench wide enough from east to west for only two city blocks and ran the main street parallel with the mountains. Six lots of 150 square rods were measured off in every block, and the blocks were separated by streets six rods wide, which is ninety nine feet. That width is why Main Street still feels generous under the trees, and the two block constraint is why the National Register nomination describes the result as a narrow version of a Mormon town grid.
The details
Getting there
Start at City Hall on Main, drive or walk north on Main to 500 North, come back and pick up State Street heading west, and follow it until the freeway. That is the L, roughly. There is nothing to see in the sense of a ruin, and that is the point of the exercise: what you are actually looking at is the street pattern the wall was drawn around, which outlasted it by a hundred and sixty years. The Main Street portion is inside the National Register district and the western arm ends at the second one.
Before you go
- No fragment of the wall is known to survive. The Clark Lane form states that no portion remains at the present time, and that form is from 1994.
- The footprint description and the specification come from two different registration forms. Neither one carries both halves.
- The seven entrances were planned and never gated, which is worth remembering before reading the wall as a defence that was used.
- The two block width is a landform constraint, not a design choice, and it still governs the shape of the old core.
The county seat
Four civic errands, one free bus route, and nowhere to move your car.
Being a county seat is an ordinary administrative fact that turns into a genuinely useful practical one here, because Davis County's civic functions are concentrated in a few blocks of a small town rather than spread across a city. The county offices are at 61 South Main Street. Farmington City Hall is at 160 South Main, about a three minute walk south. The county justice center, the Driver License Division, the Davis County Library, the post office and Farmington Junior High are all named stops or landmarks on a single free bus route, the Utah Transit Authority's route 667, which also links the commuter rail station, the retail district, Lagoon and the Lagoon campground.
That means the county clerk, the driver license office, the library and the post office are doable on foot or on a fare free bus from one place, which is not true of most county seats in this state. The transit authority's route page states plainly that route 667 requires no fare payment. The published schedule leaflet in circulation is dated April 2023, so confirm the current season and times before building a day around it, but the route itself was live on the transit authority's own site when this page was written.
The county's presence here is also a long standing economic fact rather than a recent one. The Main Street registration form notes that as the Davis County seat, county offices and the school district provided a number of jobs, and the Davis School District has its headquarters in Farmington at 45 East State Street. The civic cluster is the reason the old commercial corner at State and Main exists at all: a bank organized by local merchants in 1891 in a rented room inside the new hardware store is exactly the kind of institution a county seat generates and a farming village does not.
The adobe courthouse of 1854 and 1855 is gone, and it is not the building people mean when they talk about the old courthouse. That is a separate structure, the Davis County Memorial Courthouse of 1890 at 28 East State Street, which is still standing inside the limestone that was built around it in 1932. Both buildings and the difference between them are on the district page.
The plural household provenance, handled as architecture
Several houses in the old core exist as a set because one builder put up several homes on adjacent ground for separate households, which was the practice in this period and is the direct reason three houses of similar date sit within four blocks of one another. On Main Street, John W. Hess built houses at 479 North, 488 North and 445 North; the Main Street registration form dates them by marriage year to 1857, 1862 and 1875. Joseph Lee Robinson, one of the first settlers and the first bishop here, is recorded on the same form with a two story adobe house of about 1854 at 94 North 100 West. And the entire Clark Lane district a mile west is one family's ground developed the same way over four generations. This page treats all of it as building provenance: one builder, several surviving houses, dates and addresses, which is what a person walking the street can actually verify.
The arc
From 1,180 people to 26,163 and the sixty five years that did most of it.
This is the sequence that explains why a town with a federally listed street also has a construction site the size of a small city on its west side. Every figure below comes from a federal or municipal source and each one carries where it came from, because the city's own history page contains a growth sentence whose arithmetic does not work.
| 1892 | 1922 | 1960 | 2020 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Population | 1,180 | 1,450 | 1,951 | 24,531 | 26,163 |
| Where the number comes from | Farmington City's own history page and the National Register nomination, both stating incorporation with 1,180 residents | A city directory of 1922 and 1923, quoted in the National Register nomination | The decennial census, quoted in the National Register nomination | The decennial census | The U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program, for 1 July |
| What the town was | A newly incorporated farming village and county seat, forty years after being named | Still a village. The nomination's period of significance for the district runs on to 1961 | Under two thousand people, with the state highway still running down Main Street | A commuter city with two federal historic districts and an amusement park | Still growing, in a county where most cities were not |
| What was happening to the street | The commercial corner at State and Main had just been built, in 1891 | Cars were beginning to displace the interurban railway that served Lagoon | Interstate 15 was about to be built west of town and take the traffic off Main | Main Street was a two lane residential street inside a National Register boundary | UDOT reconstruction on SR-106 north of the district, running through winter 2026 |
| What to do with it | Use it as the incorporation date, not 1852 | Treat it as the city directory figure it is | This is the number that makes the growth legible | The decennial count, and the figure the city guide uses | Re-pull it annually; the estimate series is revised |
Population 1892, 1922 and 1960 as quoted in the National Park Service registration form for the Farmington Main Street Historic District, NRIS 11000756, and corroborated for 1892 by Farmington City's own history page. The 2024 figure is from the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program sub county file for the 2020 to 2024 vintage, whose Farmington city series runs 24,527 at the 2020 base, then 24,571, 24,582, 25,676, 25,849 and 26,163. Land area of 9.951 square miles from the Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer file. All checked in August 2026.
The city's own history page contains a population sentence whose arithmetic does not work, and the incorporation date on the practical city guide is forty years out. Farmington City's history page gives 1,180 at incorporation, about 4,700 by 1980 and approximately 26,000 after the growth period that followed, and describes the change in a way the numbers do not support. Use the city's 1892 and 1980 figures, then switch to the decennial counts and the Census Bureau's estimate series, which is what this page does. The larger problem is on this site's own practical city guide at /cities/farmington/, which gives February 1852 as the incorporation date in its stat block, its glance table and its overview. Both issuing bodies say December 1892 with a population of 1,180. What happened in 1852 was the territorial act that created Davis County, seated it here and renamed North Cottonwood. Neither date is wrong as a fact; the label on one of them is.
Living with it
The founding still decides where the streets run and where the water comes from.
The most durable thing the 1847 settlers did was build along the creeks. The Main Street registration form records that the families who followed Hector Haight built log cabins usually along the streams coming down from the mountains, and that is still legible: the oldest street lines in this city follow water rather than a compass, and the modern street named Farmington Creek Trail is named for a trail that is named for a creek. The 1853 survey then imposed a grid on top of that, two blocks wide because the bench allowed no more, with ninety nine foot streets. Both patterns are still there and they do not always agree with each other, which is why the old core has junctions that a purely gridded town would not.
The second durable thing is the canyon, which supplied the water and the stone. The city's own history page notes that five canyons above the city provide recreational opportunities, and the National Register nomination records that native fieldstone was used to construct a number of Farmington buildings and that the community is locally known for these stone buildings. That stone came out of the same drainages the water did. What the canyons are now, as a set, is a county subject, and Farmington's own end of it, the pond and the road above it, is a separate page here.
The third is the position, and it is the reason the growth arrived when it did. The 1853 plat was laid out with the road connecting Salt Lake City and Ogden running through it, which is the route Main Street still carries as State Route 106. When Interstate 15 replaced that road a mile west in the 1960s, the town's center of gravity started moving and has not stopped. The commuter rail station, the retail district, the county sports campus, the new park on Innovator Drive and the highway terminus are all on the freeway side of the city, and the two block bench the surveyors were confined to in 1853 is now the quiet half.
What that means for a household is simple enough to state and worth stating. Farmington is a town where the two ends have opposite characters and both are inside one set of city limits, and where an address is meaningfully described by which of them it sits nearer to. The old core is trees, two lanes and buildings from the 1850s. The west end is a station, a construction schedule and ground that was farmland within living memory. Neither is better and they ask completely different questions.
What survived
The Sycamore district
Sixty six contributing buildings inside the wall's footprint, and the courthouse still hiding inside the 1932 limestone.
Read the guideWhere it went next
The Park Lane district
The freeway side of the city: the rail platform, the free shuttle, the interchange under construction and the newest park.
Read the guideWhere the water came from
Farmington Pond
The canyon mouth, the community fishery at the bottom of it and the eleven graded bike trails above.
Read the guideMoving here
Living next to Lagoon
The two water bills, the fireworks line drawn across the bench, and what the park's calendar does to a street.
The mover pageThe five canyons
The Davis canyons
Seven canyon mouths, one Skyline road above them, and the snow that decides when any of it opens.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Farmington city guide
The money side: the price ladder, the tax picture, who supplies what, and what is on the market now.
Open the guideKeep reading
More of Farmington on The Local.
The park
Lagoon
Three operating rides on the National Register, listed on one day in October 2012.
Read the guideThe old core
The Sycamore district
Sixty six contributing buildings, and an 1890 courthouse sealed inside a 1932 one.
Read the guideThe canyon mouth
Farmington Pond
A state managed fishery with a dock, and eleven graded bike trails on the hill above.
Read the guideThe west end
The Park Lane district
A rail platform, a fare free shuttle, and an interchange arriving in winter 2026.
Read the guideMoving here
Living next to Lagoon
Thirty three weeks on, nineteen off, and three other cities inside the same limits.
Read the guideThe companion
Farmington, in full
A county seat with a 1921 coaster at one end and an unfinished district at the other.
Read the pageQuick answers
The founding, answered.
North Cottonwood, after the creek. Farmington City's own history page carries the original name, and the Clark Lane National Register nomination records that Hector C. Haight camped on North Cottonwood Creek near present day Farmington City. The settlement was renamed Farmington in 1852, when the Utah Territorial Legislature created Davis County and placed the county seat here. The old name is back in modern use on the city's newest park, North Cottonwood Commons at 550 Innovator Drive.
Hector Haight is the settler the record treats as the founder, and the National Register nomination for the Main Street district describes him as known as the father of Farmington. The specific framing is worth keeping, because it is unusual: he was delegated to winter cattle herds in the area in 1847 and 1848. He was sent to keep animals alive through a winter, not to establish a town. The nomination adds that several other families soon followed and built log cabins, usually along the streams coming down from the mountains.
First documented non native settlement was in 1847. The settlement was named Farmington and made the seat of the newly created Davis County in 1852. The town was platted in 1853. And the city incorporated in December 1892 with a population of 1,180, according both to Farmington City's own history page and to the National Register registration form for the Main Street Historic District. Those are four separate events across forty five years and they are frequently collapsed into a single date, usually 1852, which is the naming rather than the incorporation.
There was a mud wall, and it was never finished. Following Brigham Young's fortification request, settlers began it in 1854 and 1855, enclosing the town in an L shape two blocks wide, covering Main and 100 East Streets from almost 100 South to 500 North with an extension west along what is now State Street. As planned it was to be ten feet high, four feet thick at the bottom and two and a half at the top, with seven entrances. It reached about six feet by 1855, the gates were never hung, and by the end of the 1860s residents had leveled the dirt in their lots and the wall was gone. No portion of it remains.
Because that is all the ground there was. The town plot was surveyed in the autumn of 1853, and the surveyors located the village on a bench wide enough from east to west for only two city blocks, running the main street parallel with the mountains. They laid out six lots of 150 square rods in every block and separated the blocks with streets six rods wide, which is ninety nine feet. The National Register nomination describes the result as a narrow version of a Mormon town grid, laid out in the land between the lake and the mountains.
Seven. At the time of the 1853 survey only three adobe and four log houses had been constructed within the town plot, according to the account quoted in the Clark Lane National Register nomination. The reason the fort was planned at all was to encourage settlement inside the town rather than out on the surrounding farmland, because families had been settling on individual farm tracts in what the sources of the period describe as a haphazard pattern.
Yes, and it has been since the county was created in 1852. The county offices are at 61 South Main Street, about a three minute walk from Farmington City Hall at 160 South Main. The Davis County Memorial Courthouse is at 28 East State Street. The Davis School District is also headquartered in the city, at 45 East State Street, and the Main Street registration form notes that the county offices and the school district have long provided a number of jobs here.
From 1,180 people at incorporation in December 1892 to 26,163 on the U.S. Census Bureau's estimate for 1 July 2024. The intermediate points are documented: a city directory recorded 1,450 in 1922 and 1923, and the 1960 census recorded 1,951. The 2020 decennial count was 24,531. So this city was still under two thousand people sixty five years ago, and the streets in the Main Street Historic District are the part that did not change while the rest of it happened.
Because the highway moved. Main Street carried the historic road between Salt Lake City and Ogden and still carries State Route 106. When Interstate 15 was built to the west in the 1960s it took the through traffic off Main, and major commercial development went north of the old core in the late 1980s. The National Register nomination credits both events with preserving the historic district. The commercial and residential growth went to the freeway side instead, which is where the commuter rail station, the retail district, the county sports campus and the new park on Innovator Drive are now.
A founding record this complete is unusual, and it still does not price a house.
Everything on this page is documented at an issuing body and none of it answers the question a buyer actually has. What the founding record does give you is a way to read the town: the creek lines under the oldest streets, the two block bench that set the shape of the old core, the ninety nine foot street widths, and the reason the modern city grew on the other side of a freeway rather than around its own center. That is context for a decision rather than the decision. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works Farmington every week, 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.