The building Fruit Heights
A plaque on the wall dedicates a private packing shed to the betterment of horticulture in Utah
The Rock Loft, built out of the rock the floods brought down.
A cherry packing house at 251 South Mountain Road, put up in 1944 by Lee Jost from stone that floods rolled out of the canyons above the city, with a plaque on it dedicating the building to the betterment of horticulture in Utah. Upstairs was a supper club with an orchestra and an organ, which the 1948 highway closed. Inside was a cherry machine that filled the centre section. And from May 1978 for about fifteen years, the south end of it was Fruit Heights City Hall.
The ground I actually work is Southern Utah, a long way south of the Davis bench, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own history, water and parks pages at fruitheights.gov, the Forest Service trail record for the canyon above town, the federal geographic names list, the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll, the Census Bureau geocoder, the state municipal boundary layer, and the congressional record for the land bill. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
What is the stone building on Mountain Road, and can you go in?
It is a cherry packing house from 1944, built out of rock that floods rolled down out of the canyons above the city, and yes, in the sense that it holds small businesses and has done for decades. It stands at 251 South Mountain Road, which geocodes cleanly inside Fruit Heights with none of the ambiguity that hangs over the water park down on Main Street. There is a plaque on the wall, recorded by the Deseret News in June 2006, that reads: Erected 1944 by Lee Jost, Dedicated to Betterment of Horticulture in Utah.
That plaque is the single best artefact in this city. It is dated, it is fixed to the building, and it says in eleven words exactly what the building was for. A stone shed put up in the middle of an orchard town by a fruit grower, and dedicated not to a family or a business but to the betterment of horticulture in Utah, which is a startlingly public sentiment for a private packing shed. Anyone printing it in the present tense should confirm it is still on the wall, because the recorded sighting is twenty years old.
Two names attach to the building and both belong there. The city's own history page says the Rock Loft is owned by Dale Jost and was built out of rock that had come down from the canyons in earlier floods. The 2006 newspaper account says Lee Jost built it in 1944 and that his son Dale, returning from service in the Second World War, added the upstairs and the two wings and later owned it. Read together they reconcile rather than conflict: Lee built it, Dale extended it, Dale owned it when the city wrote its page. Only the centre section is the 1944 building. The city's account and the newspaper's are both worth reading.
The building, in numbers
1944
the year on the plaque, and the centre section
~10,000
square feet across two storeys, per the 2006 account
200
pickers at peak on the orchard it served
1978
the year the city moved its offices into the south end
The phases
A packing shed, then a dance hall, then a city hall, then a row of small shops.
Very few buildings in Davis County have had four jobs and kept the same walls, and the sequence below is most of the twentieth century of this city compressed into one address. Where the city's own account and the 2006 newspaper account differ, both are named rather than one being quietly picked.
| Phase | When | What the building was doing | Where the account comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| The centre section | 1944 | Built by Lee Jost out of rock that floods had rolled down from the canyons, as a place to sort and fresh pack cherries. The plaque on the wall dates it and dedicates it to the betterment of horticulture in Utah | The plaque itself, as recorded by the Deseret News in June 2006, and the city's own history page for the flood rock |
| The supper club | The 1940s | A restaurant and dance hall on the top floor, with dining and dancing, a full orchestra and an organ played during the interval. This is where the name comes from | The Deseret News, 2006. The city's history page records the same room and the same closure in its own words |
| The wings and the upstairs | After the Second World War | Dale Jost, back from service, added the upper floor and the two wings, taking the building to roughly ten thousand square feet across two storeys | The Deseret News, 2006. The city's page records Dale as the owner without dating the additions |
| The cherry machine | Mid century | A cherry machine filled the entire centre section, processing fruit from growers across the region rather than only from the family's own trees | The Deseret News, 2006 |
| The closure of the club | The early 1950s | The restaurant and dance hall closed. Both accounts give the same cause: the 1948 highway took the passing trade off Mountain Road | The city's history page, which records that after the highway the restaurant and dance hall that was once the top floor of the Rock Loft was closed down |
| City Hall | From May 1978, for about fifteen years | Fruit Heights City established its offices in the south end of the building, so a municipality ran itself out of a converted cherry packing shed into roughly the early nineties | The city's own history page |
| Small businesses | 1994 onward, and today | A row of independent shops. A 2006 newspaper account named four of them, and twenty years on that list should not be treated as current by anybody | The Deseret News, 2006, with the caveat attached |
Sources as named in the right hand column, all checked in August 2026. The 2006 newspaper account is the only substantial published description of this building that could be found, and it is twenty years old, so anything in it about the building's occupants is history rather than a directory. The building appears in the Kaysville and Fruit Heights Museum of History and Art catalogue and an architecture practice publishes a Rock Loft project page; neither is quoted here, and both are worth a look for anyone going deeper.
The details
Getting there
Mountain Road runs the length of the city parallel to US-89 and this building sits on it, which is the whole point of the address: before 1948 this was the route between Salt Lake City and Ogden, and a business that wanted passing trade built on it. Come north from City Hall on Mountain Road and it is on your way. The practical approach from the freeway is the 400 North interchange and then east and north through the grid.
Before you go
- Do not treat any published list of the tenants as current. The only substantial one dates from 2006 and this is a small building full of small independent businesses.
- The plaque was recorded in 2006. If it matters to you, look for it rather than assuming it is still there.
- The building is not on the National Register and nothing about it is protected by a federal designation. Call it old, not listed.
- The centre section is the 1944 building. The upper floor and the two wings came after the war, so the roof line is reading you two different decades.
The cherries
Two hundred pickers at peak, and a machine that filled the middle of the building.
The reason a building like this exists is scale. A household orchard needs a shed. An operation that needs a two storey stone packing house with a machine filling its centre section is processing fruit from a whole district, and that is what the 2006 account describes: the Jost family sorting and fresh packing cherries here, with as many as two hundred pickers working the orchard at peak, and a cherry machine that eventually filled the entire centre of the building, running fruit from growers across the region rather than only from the family's own trees.
One resident quoted in that piece, Ray Phillips, gives the detail that puts a number on the work: some of the families could pick a ton of cherries a day. That is the version of an orchard economy nobody writes down, because it is not a statistic anybody collects, and it survives here only because a newspaper asked a neighbour twenty years ago.
The superlative attached to the same operation is the claim that the Josts ran what was then the largest sweet cherry orchard in Utah. It comes from that same 2006 newspaper piece and from nowhere with an issuing body behind it, so this companion prints it attributed and dated or not at all: what the Deseret News recorded in 2006 as the largest sweet cherry orchard in the state at the time. That is not a hedge for its own sake. A superlative that traces to one source, twenty years old, deserves the source and the date attached to it.
What ties the building to the rest of the city is the crop and the road. It was built in 1944 in a town that had named itself for the fruit industry five years earlier, and its top floor closed in the early 1950s because a highway built in 1948 took the traffic off the street it stands on. Both of those facts belong to a larger story that the orchards page carries in full, and this page deliberately stops at the walls of one building.
Erected 1944 by Lee Jost, Dedicated to Betterment of Horticulture in Utah. Eleven words on a wall, and the clearest statement of purpose any building in this city has.
The civic chapter
For about fifteen years a converted cherry shed was where you went to pay your water bill.
The city's own history page carries the sentence flatly: Fruit Heights City offices were established in the Rock Loft in May 1978. The 2006 newspaper account puts them in the south end of the building and gives the duration as about fifteen years, which takes the arrangement to roughly the early nineties. So for a decade and a half, a town of somewhere between two and four thousand people ran its administration out of part of a stone packing house that a fruit grower had built for cherries.
That is not a quaint detail, it is a straightforward indicator of scale, and it is worth holding next to the current arrangement. The city now has its own building at 910 South Mountain Road, open eight in the morning until half past four, Monday through Friday, and runs departments for administration, building, business licensing, code enforcement, finance, public works, utility billing and parks and recreation out of it. What it does not run, then or now, is a police department or a fire department. A city small enough to be administered from a corner of a packing shed is a city small enough to buy its public safety in, and it still does.
The building's fourth act is the one it is in now, and it is the reason to be careful with it. It holds independent small businesses and has since at least the mid nineties, when the 2006 account records the first of the ones it names opening in 1994. Naming that 2006 list as though it were today's tenants would be wrong about four small businesses at once, which is a real thing to get wrong about real people, so this page does not do it. If you want to know what is in there now, drive up Mountain Road and look.
There is one more thing worth putting on the record about this building, because it will matter if anyone ever tries to protect it. No National Register listing for the Rock Loft could be found and it does not appear on Davis County's National Register list. That means it is old and locally significant and carries no federal designation, and a private owner is not restricted by any listing. If preservation status is material to a decision, check at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office rather than relying on this or any other page.
The best published description of this building is twenty years old, and one part of it must not be repeated as current. The Deseret News piece of 9 June 2006 is the substantial account of the Rock Loft and it names four businesses trading in the building at that time. Twenty years is a very long time in the life of small independent shops, and printing that list today would be presenting a 2006 directory as a 2026 one. This page names none of them for exactly that reason. The same caution applies to the plaque: it was recorded on the wall in 2006 and nobody has published a sighting since, so look for it rather than promising it. And nothing here is a designated historic building, so any claim that the Rock Loft is protected, listed or restricted is wrong.
Living with it
One old building on an old street in a city that kept almost nothing else from before the highway.
Mountain Road is the reason to care about this building beyond the stone. It was the route between Salt Lake City and Ogden before the flat was built on, which is why the older structures in this city are on it and why a fruit grower put a packing house there rather than anywhere else. After 1948 it stopped being a through route and became a residential street with a few older buildings on it, and it has been that ever since. Driving it end to end is twenty minutes and it is the single most efficient way to understand why this city is shaped the way it is.
For a household weighing a street near it, the honest points are small and practical. This is not a historic district and there is no design review attached to it, so nothing about proximity to the Rock Loft constrains what a neighbour can do with a lot. It is a working commercial building with independent tenants, which means a small amount of local traffic and parking on a residential street. And it is walkable from a lot of the city, which in a place with no commercial core of its own is worth something.
The wider preservation picture in this city is thin, and it is better to say so than to imply otherwise. No National Register district exists in Fruit Heights, no individual listing for this building surfaced, and the city's published account of its own history is a single page on its website. That page is genuinely good, and it is doing a lot of work that in a larger city would be spread across a museum, a historical society and a nomination file. The Kaysville and Fruit Heights Museum of History and Art holds a catalogue entry for the Rock Loft and is the obvious next stop for anybody who wants more than a website can hold.
What the building tells you about the city is the same thing every page of this companion keeps arriving at. It was built for a crop that has gone, it lost its best floor to a highway, it housed the municipality for fifteen years because the municipality was too small for a building of its own, and it is still standing and still in use. The mover page is where that pattern gets turned into what an address here actually asks of a household.
The wider story
What happened to the orchards
The fruit that named the city, the highway that took the trade, and the curve that followed.
Read the guideThe public ground
Nicholls Park
Two bookable pavilions, a castle the neighbourhood built, and a trail that hosts a story in October.
Read the guideThe other old ground
Cherry Hill
The largest block of the old farm land left, and the city line that runs down Main beside it.
Read the guideMoving here
East Kaysville
What a city with no police force, no fire crew and no postcode buys in, and from whom.
The mover pageThe practical side
The Fruit Heights city guide
The half of an address with figures on it: the market, the levy, the accounts, the drive times.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Fourteen neighbouring towns, plus the subjects that would otherwise be written fifteen times.
The region hubKeep reading
More of Fruit Heights on The Local.
The canyon
Bair Canyon
A federal map and a city government spell this canyon two ways, and both are current.
Read the guideThe line
Cherry Hill
The tax roll puts it in one city and its postbox in another. The line runs down Main.
Read the guideThe name
What happened to the orchards
A highway cut the farms in 1948 and was rebuilt through the same ground by 2023.
Read the guideThe park
Nicholls Park
Two bookable pavilions, a castle eight Eagle projects built, and a trail with a story on it.
Read the guideMoving here
East Kaysville
No police force of its own, no fire crew, no postcode, and a separation dated 1939.
Read the guideThe companion
Fruit Heights, in full
A canyon spelled twice over, a water park behind a neighbour's postcode, and no police force.
Read the pageQuick answers
The Rock Loft, answered.
A two storey stone building at 251 South Mountain Road, built in 1944 as a cherry sorting and fresh packing house and now occupied by independent small businesses. It was built out of rock that floods had rolled down out of the canyons above the city, which the city's own history page records, and a plaque on the wall recorded by the Deseret News in 2006 reads: Erected 1944 by Lee Jost, Dedicated to Betterment of Horticulture in Utah. Only the centre section is the 1944 building; the upper floor and the two wings were added after the Second World War.
Both, in different roles, and the two published accounts reconcile once read carefully. The Deseret News of 9 June 2006 records that Lee Jost built it in 1944 and that his son Dale, returning from service in the Second World War, added the upstairs and the two wings. The City of Fruit Heights history page says the Rock Loft is owned by Dale Jost and was built out of rock that had come down from the canyons in earlier floods, which is a statement of ownership at the time it was written rather than of construction. Lee built it, Dale extended it, Dale owned it.
The rock is the flood stone it is built from. The loft is the top floor, which in the 1940s held a supper club: dining and dancing, a full orchestra, and an organ played during the interval, in a town of a couple of hundred people. That club closed in the early 1950s, and both the city's history page and the 2006 newspaper account give the same reason, which is that the highway cut through in 1948 took the passing trade off Mountain Road. The building kept the name after the room stopped being what the name described.
No listing for it could be found and it does not appear on Davis County's National Register list. That means it is an old and locally significant building carrying no federal designation, and a private owner is not restricted by any listing. Nothing about it is protected in the way a designated property is. If preservation status matters to a decision you are making, check at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office rather than relying on this page, because a negative finding is harder to be certain of than a positive one.
Yes, for about fifteen years. The city's own history page records that Fruit Heights City offices were established in the Rock Loft in May 1978, and the 2006 newspaper account places them in the south end of the building and gives the duration as roughly fifteen years, which takes the arrangement into the early nineties. So a municipality ran its administration out of part of a converted cherry packing shed. The city now has its own building at 910 South Mountain Road, which is also the Harvey Park site.
This page does not say, on purpose. The only substantial published list of tenants dates from a newspaper article in June 2006, which named four independent shops trading there at the time, the earliest of them opened in 1994. Twenty years is a very long time in the life of small independent businesses, and printing that list today would present a 2006 directory as a current one and be wrong about several real people at once. The building still holds independent businesses. The way to find out which is to go up Mountain Road and look.
Roughly ten thousand square feet across two storeys, with a rock exterior, according to the Deseret News account of 2006. The important qualification is that the footprint is not all of one date: only the centre section is the 1944 building, and the upper floor and the two wings are Dale Jost's postwar additions. So the roof line is showing you two different decades of construction on one site, which is worth knowing if you are standing outside trying to work out what you are looking at.
The building was where fruit was sorted and fresh packed, and the 2006 newspaper account describes a cherry machine that eventually filled the entire centre section, processing fruit from growers across the region rather than only from the family's own trees, with as many as two hundred pickers working the orchard at peak. A resident quoted in the same piece said some of the families could pick a ton of cherries a day. The claim that this was the largest sweet cherry orchard in the state comes from that same 2006 newspaper and carries its attribution and date.
It is at 251 South Mountain Road, under a mile north of City Hall on the same street, and it geocodes cleanly inside Fruit Heights with none of the boundary ambiguity that surrounds the water park down on Main Street. It is free to look at from the street and takes about twenty minutes to appreciate properly. What is inside is a set of independent businesses with their own opening hours rather than a museum or a visitor attraction, so treat a visit as a look at a building rather than as a day out.
One building, four jobs, and the clearest sentence anybody in this city ever carved into a wall.
The Rock Loft is the best single artefact Fruit Heights has and the city guide does not mention it. A packing house built out of flood rock in a town that had just named itself for its fruit, a dance floor upstairs that a highway closed, a machine in the middle that ran a district's cherries, and a municipal office in the south end for fifteen years. If you are weighing a street near Mountain Road, drive it end to end and look at the roof line. Tell me what you are considering and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who knows these blocks.
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.