The name Fruit Heights
The same highway rearranged this town twice, seventy five years apart, and both times it worked
What happened to the orchards, and the road that came through twice.
Fruit trees on this bench from about 1855, a town that named itself Fruit Heights in 1939 because of the fruit industry, and a highway cut through the middle of the farms in 1948 that closed a service station and a dance hall and demoted the old main road. Then the population went from 175 people in 1960 to 2,731 by 1980. Then the same corridor was rebuilt as a freeway between 2020 and 2023 with an interchange of this city's own. One road, two acts, and almost all of the first one is in the city's own words.
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
Are there still orchards in Fruit Heights, and if not, what took them?
Very few, and a highway took most of them, twice. The short version, all of it dated and nearly all of it published by the city itself: fruit trees on this bench from about 1855, a town that chose the name Fruit Heights in 1939 because of the fruit industry, a highway cut through the middle of the farms in 1948, a population that went from 175 people in 1960 to 2,731 by 1980 as the orchard ground became streets, a newspaper headline in 1999 about the city losing the orchards that gave it its name, and 6,101 people on 2.29 square miles today.
This page will not tell you that you can still buy fruit here. Secondary accounts say cherries and peaches can be had in season, and that may well be true, but no currently operating stand or orchard in the city could be named by any issuing body, and naming none is more useful than naming one that closed. What can be said is that the ground that grew the fruit is mostly under houses, that one large block of it is still open because a water park and campground sit on it, and that the trees the city was named for are now a scattering rather than an industry.
The interesting part is not the disappearance, which happened to every orchard town on this bench. It is the mechanism, and the mechanism is one road. US-89 was cut through the farms in 1948 and it closed two businesses and demoted the old main street in the process. Then between 2020 and 2023 the same corridor through the same city was rebuilt as a freeway, with a new interchange at 400 North and a new bridge at Nicholls Road. The same highway changed this town twice, seventy five years apart, and the second time is recent enough that people who live here watched it happen. The city tells the first half itself.
The arc, in numbers
1855
the year the city records its first fruit trees
1939
the year the name was chosen for the fruit industry
1948
the year the highway bisected the farms
2023
the year the same corridor finished being rebuilt
The fruit
A rock house in 1855, a brickyard in 1874, and a name that was not chosen until eighty four years later.
Settlement began about 1850 along what the city calls the Old Mountain Road, the route on the slope that carried traffic between Salt Lake City and Ogden before anything ran on the flat below. The first residents the city names are Samuel Driggs, Joseph Taylor, Pleasant Green Taylor and Allen Taylor. Driggs died in 1854, Brigham Young sent John Criddle up to help, and Criddle later married Driggs's widow Elizabeth Taylor.
The fruit appears in the record almost immediately and it appears attached to a household rather than to an industry. By 1855 Grandison Raymond Sr. and his wife Celia Hall had built a rock home and were, in the city's own phrasing, one of the first to raise fruit trees, peaches, apples, apricots, plums, grapes, berries, and garden. Ebenezer Williams, William Slack, Samuel Ashton, Jabez and Joshua Harris follow, and Samuel Ward ran a brickyard here in 1874. Electricity came up Mountain Road in 1913, put in by Utah Power and Light with a stipulation the city records verbatim, that every home would purchase an electric stove.
For nearly ninety years none of that had a name of its own. It was East Kaysville, unincorporated, on the slope above the older town. What changed in 1939 was a decision to incorporate, and the story of it is the best small civic anecdote on this bench. A town needed a hundred inhabitants. Four organisers, Archie Green, E. Glenn Green, Sam Raymond and Alden Burton, met in Archie's garage and counted ninety nine. Somebody remembered that a baby was expected just before the petition had to be delivered to the Davis County Commission. The birth brought the count to a hundred, and the first meeting for the town of Fruit Heights was held on 23 August 1939. This page does not name the child, because the city does not.
The name came out of the same meeting and it came out of the crop. Fruit Heights, in the city's own words, because of the fruit industry. That is the point in the story where the fruit peaks: an industry big enough that a town named itself after it, on ground with a stone packing house going up on Mountain Road five years later. Everything after 1948 is the industry receding and the name staying put.
The one superlative on this subject, and who actually said it
The claim that the Josts ran what was then Utah's largest sweet cherry orchard is worth having and worth attributing carefully. It comes from the Deseret News, in a piece called Heritage in stone published on 9 June 2006, which describes the family sorting and fresh packing cherries in the building on Mountain Road with as many as two hundred pickers working at peak, and quotes a resident, Ray Phillips, saying that some of the families could pick a ton of cherries a day. That is a newspaper account of a superlative rather than an issuing body's finding, so the honest form of it is what the Deseret News recorded in 2006 as the largest sweet cherry orchard in the state at the time, and this companion prints it that way or not at all.
The highway
One road came through in 1948 and again in 2023, and each time it rearranged the town.
This is the structural fact about Fruit Heights and no relocation summary carries it. The same corridor has been driven through this city twice within living memory, in two completely different forms and for two completely different reasons, and both times it changed what the streets on either side of it were for.
| 1948 | 2020 to 2023 | What is different about the second time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What was built | US-89 cut through the middle of the farms. The city's own sentence is that some lovely farms were bisected by Highway 89 | The same corridor rebuilt as a freeway, with lanes widened from Main Street in Farmington to SR-193 in Layton | The first one made a highway. The second one removed the traffic lights from it, which is a different kind of barrier |
| What it did to this city specifically | Mountain Road stopped being the main route north, and the traffic that had passed the shops went to the new road | A new interchange at 400 North in Fruit Heights, which becomes 200 North as it continues west into Kaysville, and a new bridge at Nicholls Road | The 1948 road took access away. The rebuild gave a piece of it back, with a dedicated interchange this city had not had |
| What closed or opened | The service station, garage and store run by Archie Green closed. So did the restaurant and dance hall on the top floor of the Rock Loft | Nothing recorded as closing. A second new bridge went in at Crestwood Road in Layton, and Gordon Avenue was extended by about three miles | The first was a loss of trade. The second was a construction period followed by better access |
| What happened next | The population went from 124 in 1950 to 175 in 1960 and then to 2,731 by 1980 as orchards became subdivisions | The city was already built out at about six thousand people and the population has been flat to slightly down since | In 1948 the road preceded the growth. By 2023 there was no growth left for it to enable |
| How well it is documented | The city's own history page, in its own words, naming the businesses | News coverage of the completion event, because the project's own web domains have since been retired | The older event is better sourced than the newer one, which is not the usual direction |
The 1948 column is from the City of Fruit Heights history page, checked in August 2026. The 2020 to 2023 column is from the coverage of the UDOT U.S. 89 Farmington to I-84 project, which began in February 2020 and whose completion was marked on 30 June 2023; the department's own project pages for it have been retired, so those dates come from the reporting of the completion event rather than from UDOT directly, and the 400 North interchange opening was reported on 2 November 2022. Verify any of the 2020 to 2023 figures at the Utah Department of Transportation before relying on them.
The details
Getting there
To read the two highways off the ground, drive Mountain Road from one end of the city to the other first, because that is the old route and it still has the older buildings on it, including the Rock Loft. Then take the 400 North interchange onto US-89 and come back in over the Nicholls Road bridge. Twenty minutes of that will tell you more about why the streets here are laid out as they are than any map of the city, because the answer is that a highway went through the middle of it and then went through again.
Before you go
- Mountain Road is the old main route and the reason the oldest buildings are on it. It is a residential street now with a very different job from the one it had before 1948.
- The 400 North interchange changes name as it crosses the corridor: it is 400 North on the Fruit Heights side and 200 North on the Kaysville side.
- The rebuild is finished. This is not a project to hedge as planned, though the dates for it should be confirmed at the transportation department rather than taken from any page about it.
- The city hub describes the corridor as rebuilt into a limited access road without saying when. The answer is 2020 to 2023, and the interchange opened in November 2022.
What is left
A stone packing house, a name, a water park on old farm ground and a population curve that flattened out.
What survives of the fruit is not the trees, it is the buildings and the boundaries. The Rock Loft on Mountain Road is the clearest piece: a 1944 building put up out of rock that floods rolled down the canyons, built to sort and fresh pack cherries, and it is still there and still full of small businesses. Its own page carries the plaque, the builder, the supper club upstairs and the fifteen years the city ran itself out of the south end of it.
The second piece is a boundary. The largest contiguous block of old farm ground inside the city that never became houses is the roughly nineteen and a half acres on the east side of Main Street that Cherry Hill sits on, and it is only open because somebody put an attraction on it instead of a subdivision. The boundary page covers that ground and the city line that runs beside it.
The third piece is the population curve, and it is the one that tells you the story is over rather than ongoing. The steep section is 1960 to 1980, from 175 residents to 2,731, which is the two decades when the orchards went under streets. Then 4,200 by 1989 and 4,700 by 2000. Then 6,101 at the 2020 count and 5,971 on the most recent published estimate, which is a fall of about 130. A city cannot lose orchards it has already lost, and it cannot grow onto ground it does not have. Both of those arrived at about the same time.
There is one more thing the fruit left behind and it is the least obvious. The city has almost no shops of its own, and the reason runs straight back through this page: the businesses that served Mountain Road closed when the highway took the traffic in 1948, the ground that came free went to housing rather than to a commercial strip, and by the time the corridor was rebuilt in 2023 there was no undeveloped commercial land left to build on. That is why groceries and errands from an address here are in Kaysville or Farmington, and it is a consequence of a road rather than a planning preference.
Two claims about this subject are repeated everywhere and neither one survives a check. The first is that Mountain Road carried Pony Express riders. The Utah leg of that route ran southwest and then west out of Salt Lake City to the west desert, and the National Pony Express Association's own Utah station list contains no Davis County station and no northern branch. The service ran from April 1860 to October 1861 and it did not come this way. The stagecoach and mail part of the tradition is defensible, because local accounts describe Mountain Road as an early route between Salt Lake City and Ogden with a mail stop on it for decades, and that is the version to keep. The second is that there are still orchards here in the commercial sense; no currently operating stand or orchard in the city could be named by any issuing body, so this page names none rather than sending anyone to a gate that may not open.
Living with it
What a fruit town that stopped being one actually looks like from a street here now.
The practical shape of the history is this. The city is houses, two parks, one water park and a canyon, on 2.29 square miles with no commercial core, because the commercial core died with the 1948 highway and the ground it would have needed went to housing in the seventies. So an address here is a residential address in the fullest sense: quiet, bounded, close to a freeway interchange, and dependent on the two neighbouring cities for shops, schools and services. Whether that is a feature or a cost is a household question and this page will not answer it for anybody.
What is genuinely stable about it is worth naming, because stability is the thing this history actually bought. The city cannot grow outward: US-89 on the west, Kaysville on the north, Farmington on the south, national forest on the east. There is no annexation ground and no large undeveloped parcel waiting for an application. The one piece of land that could change hands is the roughly 296 acres above the city that Congress has been asked twice to convey, and that is national forest today and would be public ground if it ever moved. Very few Wasatch Front cities can say their edges are settled.
The 2023 rebuild is the part a buyer should actually go and drive, because it is recent enough that its effects are still being discovered. A freeway conversion changes noise, changes access and changes which streets carry traffic to the interchange, and three years is not long enough for that to have fully settled into how people move around. Drive the 400 North interchange at a commuting hour and drive Nicholls Road over its new bridge, and then drive the same two at nine on a Sunday morning, and you will know something about a specific street that no page can tell you.
The market half of all this belongs somewhere else on purpose. What a street with orchard ground behind it is worth, what is listed on it, and what the levy comes to are questions with dollar signs in them, and they live on the practical city guide. This page is the reason the streets are shaped the way they are.
What survived
The Rock Loft
The 1944 cherry packing house on Mountain Road, its plaque, its dance floor and its fifteen years as City Hall.
Read the guideThe last open block
Cherry Hill
Nineteen and a half acres of old farm ground and the city line that runs down Main Street beside it.
Read the guideMoving here
East Kaysville
Why a city with no shops, no police force and no postcode of its own still works as an address.
The mover pageThe public ground
Nicholls Park
Two bookable pavilions, a castle playground and a shaded trail that turns into a story each October.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Fruit Heights city guide
The market half of a bench address, with the providers, the levy and the listings on these streets.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Every town on this bench gets a companion, and seven shared subjects get written once.
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 park
Nicholls Park
Two bookable pavilions, a castle eight Eagle projects built, and a trail with a story on it.
Read the guideThe building
The Rock Loft
Flood rock out of the canyon, a 1944 plaque, and a dance floor that the highway closed.
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 orchards, answered.
Very few, and this page names none, deliberately. Secondary accounts say cherries and peaches can still be bought in season in the city, and that may be right, but no currently operating stand or orchard here could be confirmed with any issuing body, and sending someone to a gate that may have closed is worse than saying so. What is certain is that the commercial fruit industry the city named itself after is gone: the ground it grew on is mostly under houses, and a newspaper headline in 1999 was already about the city losing the orchards that gave it its name.
Because of the crop, and the name was chosen at incorporation rather than inherited. The area was known as East Kaysville until 23 August 1939, when a group of residents incorporated it as a town and, in the city's own words, named it Fruit Heights because of the fruit industry. The fruit itself goes back much further: the city records that by 1855 Grandison Raymond Sr. and his wife Celia Hall had built a rock home and were among the first to raise fruit trees, peaches, apples, apricots, plums, grapes, berries and garden on the bench.
A town needed a hundred inhabitants and the organisers could only find ninety nine. The city's own history records four of them, Archie Green, E. Glenn Green, Sam Raymond and Alden Burton, meeting in Archie's garage and coming up one short, until somebody remembered that a baby was expected just before the petition had to reach the Davis County Commission. The birth took the count to a hundred, the petition went in, and the first meeting for the town of Fruit Heights was held on 23 August 1939. The city does not name the child and neither does this page.
It cut through the farms and moved the traffic off the old road. The city's own sentence is that in 1948 some lovely farms were bisected by Highway 89. What it names as closing with it is specific: the service station, garage and store run by Archie Green, and the restaurant and dance hall that occupied the top floor of the Rock Loft on Mountain Road. Mountain Road had been the route between Salt Lake City and Ogden and it stopped being one. That is the single event most responsible for this city having almost no commercial street of its own today.
Yes, and it is finished rather than planned. The Utah Department of Transportation's U.S. 89 Farmington to I-84 project began in February 2020 and its completion was marked on 30 June 2023, converting a signalised highway into a freeway and widening lanes from Main Street in Farmington up to SR-193 in Layton. Inside Fruit Heights it built a new interchange at 400 North, which becomes 200 North as it continues west into Kaysville, and a new bridge at Nicholls Road. The department's own project pages have since been retired, so confirm any date at UDOT rather than at a news archive.
It grew between 1960 and 1980 and it is not growing now. The city's own published figures run 100 residents in 1939, 124 in 1950, 175 in 1960, 800 in 1970 when it reached city status, 2,731 in 1980, 4,200 in 1989 and 4,700 in 2000. The 2020 decennial census counted 6,101 and the most recent published estimate on the state's municipal boundary layer is 5,971, a fall of about 130. The city is bounded by US-89, Kaysville, Farmington and national forest, so there is no annexation ground and effectively no room left to build into.
No. The Utah leg of the Pony Express ran southwest and then west out of Salt Lake City into the Great Basin, and the National Pony Express Association's own list of Utah stations contains no Davis County station and no northern branch. The route operated from April 1860 to October 1861 and it did not come up this bench. What is defensible is the stagecoach and mail part of the same tradition: local accounts describe Mountain Road as an early route between Salt Lake City and Ogden that carried mail for decades, and the Pony Express name appears to have been absorbed into that over time.
Yes, and the best account of it is a newspaper rather than an issuing body, so it is worth attributing carefully. The Deseret News, in a piece published on 9 June 2006, describes the Jost family running what it called the state's largest sweet cherry orchard at the time, sorting and fresh packing cherries in the stone building on Mountain Road with as many as two hundred pickers at peak, and quotes a resident saying some families could pick a ton of cherries a day. That is a 2006 newspaper's superlative and it should carry that attribution rather than being repeated as an established fact.
Not in 2026. The city celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in August 1989, which puts its ninetieth on 23 August 2029 and its centennial in 2039. What did happen in 2026 is that the city moved Founders Day, its own celebration of the 23 August 1939 incorporation, forward to 29 June, in its own words in honour of the 250th anniversary of the country's Declaration of Independence. That date has passed and no 2027 date is published, so take the next one from the city calendar or its Ridgerunner newsletter rather than from any listing.
A name that outlived its crop, and a road that came through twice to make sure.
The history here is not decoration, it is the explanation for the shape of the place. No commercial street, because the one that existed lost its traffic in 1948. No room to grow, because the highway, two cities and a national forest fixed the edges before anybody thought to annex. A freeway interchange of the city's own, three years old, that changed how these streets connect to everything. Drive Mountain Road end to end and then cross at 400 North, and tell me what you are weighing. I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who works this bench, 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.