City Fruit Heights, Davis County
A small orchard bench in central Davis County that took its own name in 1939
Fruit Heights, a small orchard bench that borrows almost everything but its name
Fruit Heights is a small bench town in central Davis County, just over 6,000 people on 2.29 square miles between US-89 and the national forest. It was called East Kaysville until it incorporated in 1939, and it still shares Kaysville's ZIP code, its fire cover and its policing. The water park inside the city limits lists a Kaysville address; the canyon above town is spelled Bair on the map and Baer on the trailhead sign. This page maps the town's deeper pages and the Davis County subjects a Fruit Heights address really uses.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
Fruit Heights is a small, mostly finished bench town in central Davis County, and the first thing to understand is how much of it belongs to Kaysville on paper. It began as an unincorporated stretch of orchards called East Kaysville, took the name Fruit Heights when it incorporated in 1939, and never picked up a ZIP code, a police force or a fire crew of its own. So the mail says Kaysville, the fire engine comes from Kaysville, and the water park inside the city limits lists a Kaysville address, even though the town has been its own city for more than eighty years. What is actually here is quiet: houses on the slope, two parks, Cherry Hill, and the canyon trails at the top of the bench.
Buying or selling in Fruit Heights?
Start here
The town is its own city, and it borrows almost everything else from Kaysville
Start with the one fact that explains most of the others. Until 1939 this was not Fruit Heights at all. It was East Kaysville, an unincorporated stretch of orchards on the slope above the older town, with no separate government and no separate name. When a group of residents incorporated it that year, they gave it a name of its own, but they left the practical arrangements where they were. Eighty odd years later, that is still true.
So the town shares Kaysville's ZIP code, 84037, and has none of its own, which is why a Fruit Heights address prints Kaysville on almost every label. It has no police department and no fire department, and says so plainly: it contracts its policing to the Davis County Sheriff's Office and its fire and ambulance cover to the Kaysville Fire Department. It has no school and very little shopping inside the line. For schools, a supermarket or a hardware store, a resident drives into Kaysville, usually a couple of minutes away.
The scale is the other half of the story. This is about 2.29 square miles holding just over six thousand people, walled in by US-89 on the west, Kaysville to the north, Farmington to the south, and the national forest on the east, with almost no room left to grow. What sits inside the line is close to all houses, plus Nicholls Park, the Gailey Trail, and the Cherry Hill water park. The mover page works through what all of that means for a household, from which side of Main Street a parcel sits on to which water provider serves it.
The long view
Orchards named the town, then a highway and the subdivisions took them
Fruit trees went in on this slope from the 1850s, and for the better part of a century the bench was orchard ground. When the residents incorporated in 1939 they named the town Fruit Heights for the fruit industry, and at that point there were only about a hundred people here. The old life of the town ran along Mountain Road, the higher street that carried the route between Salt Lake City and Ogden before anything was built on the flat below, which is why the oldest buildings, the stone Rock Loft among them, all face it.
Then the road moved. US-89 was cut through the farms on the ground to the west at the end of the 1940s, Mountain Road stopped being the way north, and the orchards began giving way to houses. The population went from about 175 in 1960 to more than 2,700 by 1980 as the trees came out and subdivisions went in, and by the end of the century the town had grown to a few thousand while the orchards it was named for had mostly gone. It reached six thousand at the 2020 census and has held about there since, because a town boxed in by a highway, two neighbors and a national forest runs out of room.
That whole arc, the first fruit trees, the residents who set out to incorporate, the highway that split the farms, and the numbers that followed, is the subject of the orchards page, which is where the town's history really lives.
A stretch of orchards with no name of its own, then a town of a hundred, then a finished bench of six thousand, and the trees it was named for mostly gone by the end.
The wider county
Two Davis County subjects really reach this bench, and the rest are somebody else's drive
Some subjects belong to the whole county rather than any one town, so The Local writes them once for all of Davis. Fruit Heights has a real stake in two of them: the canyons that rise straight off its east bench, and the county's family days out, one of which is the water park inside the town.
Straight up the slope
The Davis canyons
The bench canyons as a set, with the crest road above them, the seasons and the gates, and where the shoreline trail runs between the mouths. Bair Canyon is one of them.
Read the guide
Days out
Family weekends in Davis County
The county's paid and free days out, seasoned and sorted in one place, free ones first, and Cherry Hill inside this town is one of them.
Read the guideThe county's water subjects are on the far side of the valley from here. Antelope Island is reached from the Syracuse causeway, well to the north and west. The Legacy Parkway Trail, Farmington Bay and the county's lakeside ponds all sit out on the flat below, while Fruit Heights is a dry bench town east of US-89 with no water edge of its own. Hill Air Force Base is a commute at the north end of the county, and the county page covers it. All the shared subjects are indexed on the Davis County hub.
If you only have one day
A stone packing house, a flat shaded loop, a water park on the wrong side of a ZIP code and a very steep trail
First thing
Stand outside the Rock Loft
A 1944 building of flood rock hauled out of the canyon, on Mountain Road, that later served about fifteen years as the town's City Hall. Free, and twenty minutes on the sidewalk.
The Rock Loft page
Mid morning
Walk the Gailey Trail
The town's flat, shaded option at Nicholls Park, with a castle playground and two bookable pavilions at one end. Free, and about an hour with the park.
The park page
Midday
Sort out which city you are in
A water park and campground on a Kaysville mailing address that the county tax roll puts in Fruit Heights. Open through the warm season, closed Sundays. Half a day if you go in.
The Cherry Hill page
If you have the legs
Start up the canyon trail
A steep climb off the east bench with three creek crossings, on a route the county rates difficult and the Forest Service says is easy to lose. Free, and a full half day.
The canyon pageThe year here
A founding day in summer, two nights of fairy tales in October, and a watering rule all summer
Founders Day is the town's own celebration, marking the 1939 incorporation, held at Nicholls Park with a chalk festival and a quilt show in the days before the main evening. The date moves from year to year, and it has drifted around the calendar recently, so take it from the city's events page in the spring rather than assuming a fixed week.
The better known evening is Fable Forest. For two nights each October the flat Gailey Trail at Nicholls Park turns into a walk through Rapunzel, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and a few others, acted by local teenagers, family friendly and only a little spooky. It is a joint project of the youth councils of Fruit Heights and Kaysville, and admission is one nonperishable food item for the Bountiful Food Pantry. In its first year it drew a couple of thousand people, in a town of six thousand. The park page has the rest.
The rest of the calendar is small and mostly informal: a free movie night, a community service day, a youth council for the high school grades. The one thing that shapes an ordinary summer here is water. The town's secondary irrigation providers ask for watering two days a week and none in the heat of the day, and which provider serves a given street depends on the address, so a new owner checks that along with everything else.
One durable thing about the setting: the upper streets sit directly below the canyon mouth, so the east canyon wind can come down hard, and the town keeps its summer fireworks and open fire rules tight because the national forest is right above it. Take the current fireworks dates and the designated spot from the city each June, since the restrictions tighten in a dry year.
The Fruit Heights pages
Seven pages on the town, from the canyon and the water park to what an address here asks
Everything The Local has written about Fruit Heights itself: the ranked short list, the canyon above town spelled two ways, the water park whose mailing address and tax roll disagree, the orchards and the name they left behind, the park with a castle playground and a fairy tale walk, the 1944 stone packing house on Mountain Road, and the honest account of what a home in a town with no police force, no fire crew and no ZIP code of its own asks of a household.
Quick answers
Fruit Heights, answered
No. Fruit Heights is a separate incorporated city and has been since 1939, when the orchard bench then known as East Kaysville chose its own name. What makes the question fair is how much the two towns still share. Fruit Heights uses Kaysville's ZIP code, 84037, and has none of its own, so its mail and its listings print Kaysville. Its fire and ambulance cover is contracted to the Kaysville Fire Department, and its policing to the Davis County Sheriff's Office. It has no school and very little shopping inside its own boundary. The line between the two is real, but almost everything day to day crosses it.
Because Fruit Heights has no ZIP code of its own. It sits inside 84037, which belongs to Kaysville, so the Postal Service, delivery services and most online forms print Kaysville as the city on a Fruit Heights address. It is a mailing label, not a boundary. Your home can be firmly inside Fruit Heights on the county tax roll and still show Kaysville on every parcel, and that is normal here rather than a mistake.
On the Wasatch bench in central Davis County, east of US-89, between Kaysville to the north and Farmington to the south, with the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest rising directly behind it on the east. It covers about 2.29 square miles and does not reach Interstate 15 or touch Layton. Because it climbs the slope, the town spans a real change in elevation from its western edge up to the canyon mouths, so there is no single tidy elevation for it.
For fruit that is mostly gone, and for a name it took from it. The bench was planted in orchards from the 1850s on, and when it incorporated in 1939 the residents named it Fruit Heights for the fruit industry. Most of those orchards became houses over the following decades. What stands out today is Cherry Hill, a water park and campground inside the city limits; Bair Canyon and the trail above town; Nicholls Park with its castle playground; and the Rock Loft, a 1944 stone packing house on Mountain Road.
More than a town this size usually offers, because a lot of it is outdoors. Cherry Hill runs a water park and campground through the warm season. Nicholls Park has a castle playground, two bookable pavilions and the flat, shaded Gailey Trail, which turns into the Fable Forest walk for two nights each October. Bair Canyon climbs steeply from the east bench for stronger hikers. And the Rock Loft is worth a look from the street. Beyond the town line, the Davis County canyons and the county's family day trips are a short drive.
Fruit Heights. Cherry Hill sits inside the Fruit Heights city limits on the county tax roll, on the east side of Main Street where the boundary runs. Its own listings show a Kaysville address, which is correct as a mailing address only, because Fruit Heights shares Kaysville's ZIP code. So a visitor can be inside Fruit Heights and reading Kaysville on the ticket at the same time.
Both spellings are in current use, and neither is simply a typo. Maps and the Davis County trail guide spell the canyon Bair, and it is generally traced to the Bair family, early settlers who built one of the county's first sawmills near the canyon mouth in the 1850s. The trailhead sign at the bottom, though, reads Baer. So a hiker's map and the sign at the start of the trail disagree, and both spellings turn up on official signs and pages around town.
No. Given its size, Fruit Heights contracts both, and says so plainly. Law enforcement and around the clock paramedic service come from the Davis County Sheriff's Office, and fire, ambulance and rescue come from the Kaysville Fire Department on South Main. For a resident it works like any other city service; it is simply run by the county and by the neighboring city rather than by a department Fruit Heights staffs itself. Check any non emergency number with the agency directly.
That depends on what you want from a town, so here are the plain facts to weigh. Fruit Heights is small and effectively finished: about six thousand people on 2.29 square miles of mostly houses, two parks and a water park, with no downtown of its own and canyon trails at the top of the bench. It leans on Kaysville for schools, shopping and its ZIP code, and on the county and Kaysville for police and fire. Two things are worth checking on any specific home: which side of Main Street it sits on, because the city line runs down it, and which of the area's secondary water providers serves that address. The town pages here work through the rest.
A small town that asks a buyer to check a few specific things
Fruit Heights is small, mostly finished, and unusually specific about what a home here asks you to check. Which side of Main Street a parcel sits on, because the city line runs down it. Which secondary water provider serves that address. What contracted police and fire cover mean in practice when neither department is the town's own. How close a street sits to the canyon trailhead above the bench. Tell me what you are weighing, and I will connect you with a Davis County partner agent who knows this bench, and stay on the file for the financing side.
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