The empty one Kaysville
The last New Deal public building left in Davis County
The Rock Building, and the argument Kaysville keeps having about it
The Rock Building is the old Kaysville City Hall, a long stone building at 44 North Main Street, two blocks north of Center. A young mayor announced it in 1940, New Deal money paid part of it, the war stopped the work, and a county health director found the grant that finished it in 1943. It has been a city hall, a county health center, a library and an art gallery, and it has stood empty since 2015. It is the last New Deal public building left in Davis County, and today it is closed, so a visit means the sidewalk and the stonework.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
The Rock Building is the old Kaysville City Hall, a long single story building faced in local fieldstone at 44 North Main Street, two blocks north of Center. It went up between 1941 and 1943 with New Deal money, and it has since served as a city hall, the county health center, the Kaysville library and an art gallery. It has stood effectively empty since 2015, it is the only New Deal public building still standing in Davis County, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is closed and in poor condition, so what you can do is stand on the sidewalk, look at the stone and read the 1943 mill monument in the plaza. What happens to it next is genuinely undecided.
The building
Local fieldstone, a Salt Lake firm and a style with a name most people have never heard
The building is a long, single story block with short wings, drawn in a style called PWA Moderne, or Stripped Classical: classical proportions with the ornament taken off. That is what public money built across the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and once you know the name you can read the shape of it from the sidewalk. The architects were Raymond J. Ashton and Raymond L. Evans of Salt Lake City.
The stone is the local half of it, and it is why the town calls the place the Rock Building rather than the old city hall. The walls are faced in fieldstone laid in a random pattern, and the stone was gathered nearby and matches the earliest stone houses in the area. So a building drawn in a national federal style ended up wearing the same rock as the pioneer houses two streets over. That is the detail that makes it a Kaysville building rather than a generic New Deal one.
Ashton and Evans were not a small town outfit, and their other work says so. It includes the George Thomas Library and fieldhouses at the University of Utah, the university's Union Building, the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Building, the Salt Lake Sears store, Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City, the state penitentiary at the Point of the Mountain, and the naval supply depot at Clearfield that became the Freeport Center. The same office drew a small city hall in Kaysville and one of the largest supply depots in the world twelve miles up the road.
The Rock Building, in numbers
$55,000
the cost the mayor announced in November 1940
$20,000
of it paid by federal New Deal funds
1 of 5
New Deal buildings in Davis County, and the only one left
2019
the year it went on the National Register
How it got built
A mayor of twenty five, a world war, and a county health director working above a bank
The story runs in order and the order is the point. In November 1940 the twenty five year old mayor Thornley K. Swan announced a fifty five thousand dollar city hall. A bond election followed in 1941, and twenty thousand dollars of the cost was paid through the New Deal works program. Then Pearl Harbor. Work halted in December 1941, the federal funds were cut, and construction was pushed to 1943. The town museum dates the start of construction to October 1941, which sits comfortably inside that 1941 to 1943 span.
What finished it was a second idea rather than a second bond. The plan shifted to putting a county health center in part of the building, and the man behind that was Dr. Keith Barnes, the Davis County Health Department director and a Kaysville resident, who had been running the county health department from an office above the old Barnes Bank downtown. Barnes found the federal grant that completed the job. City offices took the south side of the finished building and the county health department took the north. It was done by the fall of 1943 and in use by early 1944.
That closes a loop with the rest of Main Street. The man who saved the city hall was working in a room above the Barnes bank three blocks away, and the bank, the family, the architect and the governor who steered the federal money are all one small network on one street. The Main Street page carries the whole of it.
The governor is worth naming. Henry Hooper Blood, the seventh governor of Utah, was a Kaysville native who held office through the Great Depression and was well placed to bring federal money home to his own town. His house on South 300 West is on the National Register too, and as a young bishop he had broken ground for the Kaysville Tabernacle in 1912. The building at 44 North Main is one thread in a very local web.
The library and the gallery
The building most of the town remembers as the old library
The library thread starts twenty years before the stone building. After a special election in 1920, Kaysville's first public library opened in 1921 in a leased building on Locust Street, and it quickly became the busiest library per capita in the state. That is the sort of line that tells you what a small farming town in the 1920s thought was worth paying for.
The library moved into the stone building in 1962 and stayed more than forty years. City offices moved out to the new municipal building to the south in 1987, which left the library the whole place; Davis County took over library operations in 2006; and the branch moved to its current home on Fairfield Road in 2014. By the time the building was added to the National Register in 2019 it was already vacant, with the city noting that it hoped to find a new use for it.
There was also a gallery in it, and the name attached to it is the other name Kaysville's Main Street carries. The LeConte Stewart Art Gallery filled the southwest corner room. The Craftsman and Prairie style treatment in that room was actually a 1980s makeover rather than anything original, and by the time of the last survey the room still held its furniture but none of its art. Stewart himself lived and worked a few blocks away, in the only house he ever owned, from 1923 until his death in 1990, and his house and studio are separately on the National Register.
The building's condition is the reason none of that can be visited now. Water damage has caused the interior drywall to fail and exposed the wire mesh behind it, and that mesh has deteriorated to the point where it threatens the stone facing unless it is repaired. That was already the picture in 2019, nothing published since suggests the water problem has been solved, and the 2026 endangered listing calls the building unsuitable for occupancy.
Seeing it today
How to see it, from the sidewalk and no closer
Park on or near Main Street in the couple of blocks north of Center and walk. The building sits back from the street behind a paved plaza, which is unusual for Main Street here and was deliberate: the plaza and the monument in it were part of the original 1943 design. Everything worth seeing is visible from the sidewalk. Do not try to get in, do not go looking for an unlocked door, and treat the site as what it is, a closed municipal building in poor condition.
The two things to look at are the stone and the monument. The walls reward a close look, because the fieldstone is the same rock the pioneer houses nearby are built from. About sixty feet back from the street sits a cast concrete bench and monument to the 1854 Weinel Flour Mill, built in 1943 alongside the building and by the same architects. The National Register listing counts both the building and that monument, so the little marker in the plaza is a listed piece in its own right, and it is easy to walk straight past.
The details
Before you go
- The building is closed and it is not safe to enter. There is no interior tour and no open day, so this is an exterior visit on a public street.
- It is not the current City Hall. The city works from a newer building on Center Street, and the old stone one on Main Street is the subject here.
- Look closely at the stonework and find the small 1943 mill monument in the plaza. Both are worth the walk and the monument is easy to miss.
- Read the condition honestly. Water has damaged the interior and left the wall mesh deteriorating, and the stone facing needs repair before anyone can use the place again.
Where things stand
Five years of saying no to a bulldozer, and still no plan to say yes to
Here is the honest state of it as of 2026. The building has stood effectively empty since 2015. A 2017 remodel uncovered mold in the walls and turned the question from what to put in the building into whether to keep it at all. A demolition proposal was postponed in September 2021 after a petition and public opposition at a council meeting. In October 2022 the city asked for restoration proposals and gave supporters about eighteen months, and that window passed in early 2024 without a funded plan. In 2026 Preservation Utah named the building one of the state's Most Endangered Places and said no long term plan or funding is in place, with the cost of saving it running into the millions.
So no decision has been reached, and that is the whole answer. Anything you read that describes a settled outcome, a demolition date, a museum lease or a restoration start, is running ahead of what the town has actually decided, and there is a fair amount of that in circulation. What the record shows instead is a slow, public argument: a petition against demolition, a council that postponed rather than pushed, a request for proposals rather than a bulldozer, and a statewide preservation body still watching.
The most telling detail is where the town's museum currently lives. The Kaysville-Fruit Heights Museum of History and Art sits in the foyer of the current City Hall on Center Street, and in 2018 the city offered its committee the chance to negotiate a lease of the stone building for museum use. Years on, the museum is still in a lobby and the stone building is still empty a couple of hundred yards up Main Street. That gap is the argument, in one sentence.
For a household weighing an address in the older part of Kaysville, this is a useful thing to understand rather than a thing to worry about. It tells you the street is a genuinely legible three blocks, a 1910 bank block, a 1912 tabernacle, a 1943 stone city hall and four National Register houses within a short walk, and that the town argues about that inheritance in the open. The market side of a Kaysville address belongs on the practical city guide, and the rest of what living here asks is on the moving to Kaysville page.
The building is closed and it is not safe to go in. Water damage has left the wall mesh deteriorating and the stone facing at risk, so this is an exterior visit from a public sidewalk only. Do not look for a way inside, and do not treat any rumor about the building's future as settled, because as of 2026 nothing about it has been decided.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Quick answers
The Rock Building, answered
The old Kaysville City Hall, a long single story building of local fieldstone at 44 North Main Street, built between 1941 and 1943. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designed by the Salt Lake firm of Ashton and Evans in a PWA Moderne, or Stripped Classical, style, faced in fieldstone gathered nearby and laid in a random pattern. Over the years it has held city offices, the Davis County Health Department, the Kaysville Public Library from 1962, and the LeConte Stewart Art Gallery.
Because of the stone, and because the stone is local. The fieldstone was gathered from nearby sources and matches the earliest stone houses in town, so a building drawn in a national federal style by a Salt Lake City firm ended up faced in exactly the same rock as the pioneer houses a couple of streets away. That is what makes it a Kaysville building rather than a generic New Deal one. It also goes by the old city hall and the old library, and all three names mean the same place.
No decision has been reached. A demolition proposal was postponed in September 2021 after a petition and public opposition at a council meeting, and in October 2022 the city asked for restoration proposals over a window of about eighteen months, which passed in early 2024 without a funded plan. In 2026 Preservation Utah named the building one of the state's Most Endangered Places and noted that no long term plan or funding is in place. As of 2026 its future is still open, so anything describing a settled outcome is running ahead of the record.
No. It is closed and in poor condition. Water damage has caused interior drywall to fail and left the wire mesh behind it exposed and deteriorating, which threatens the stone facing until it is repaired. Structural and mold problems were found during a 2017 remodel, and the building has stood effectively empty since 2015. Preservation Utah's 2026 listing calls it unsuitable for occupancy. This is an exterior visit from a public sidewalk and nothing more.
Partly through a mayor and partly through a governor. In November 1940 the twenty five year old mayor Thornley K. Swan announced a fifty five thousand dollar city hall, a bond election followed in 1941, and twenty thousand dollars came from federal New Deal funds. Henry Hooper Blood, the seventh governor of Utah, was a Kaysville native who held office through the Depression and was well placed to steer federal money to his home town. When the war cut off the federal funds, the county health director Dr. Keith Barnes found the health center grant that finished the job in 1943.
It is the only one still standing. Utah put up 226 buildings under the New Deal in the 1930s and early 1940s, twenty two of them city halls, and five of them in Davis County. The old Kaysville City Hall is the only one of those five that survives. That single fact is the strongest case for the building's importance, and it comes from the federal record rather than from a local campaign.
A cast concrete bench and monument to the 1854 Weinel Flour Mill. It was built in 1943, at the same time as the city hall and by the same architects, and it sits in a paved plaza about sixty feet back from Main Street. The National Register listing counts two features at the site, the building and this monument, so it is a listed piece in its own right rather than street furniture. It is easy to walk past and it is the second thing to look at on a short visit.
In the north foyer of the current City Hall at 23 East Center Street. The Kaysville-Fruit Heights Museum of History and Art serves both towns and keeps daytime hours on weekdays, though a volunteer run museum can change them, so confirm before a trip. The museum has been among the strongest voices for keeping the stone building, and in 2018 the city offered its committee the chance to negotiate a lease of it for museum use.
A Salt Lake City architecture firm, Raymond J. Ashton and Raymond L. Evans, whose other work shows this was no small town commission. They designed the George Thomas Library and fieldhouses at the University of Utah, the university's Union Building, the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Building, the Salt Lake Sears store, Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City, the state penitentiary at the Point of the Mountain, and the naval supply depot at Clearfield that became the Freeport Center. The same office drew a small city hall in Kaysville and one of the largest supply depots in the world twelve miles north.
A building this town has spent five years refusing to knock down
The Rock Building is a good example of what the practical guides to a city leave out, and of why the older streets of a place are worth understanding before you buy on one. Kaysville's Main Street holds a 1910 bank block, a 1912 tabernacle, a 1943 New Deal city hall and four National Register houses inside a short walk, and none of that appears in a market summary. If you are weighing an address in the older part of town, tell me what you are trying to solve and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who works these streets, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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