City Sunset, Davis County
A rectangle 1.9 miles long with a freeway down the seam and a federal quarter on the far side
Sunset, a town explained by one line on the map.
5,475 people at the 2020 decennial census on about 1.47 square miles at the top of Davis County, with the Davis and Weber county line for a north boundary, a railroad for a west boundary, and Interstate 15 running down the middle. About 255 acres of Hill Air Force Base sits inside the city limits, which is roughly a quarter of the city. Main Street runs a matter of yards west of the freeway that took its east side in the 1960s. Five pages on the city itself, and a clean handover to the one county subject an address here really uses.
Sunset sits at the top of Davis County, a long drive north of the Southern Utah ground I actually work, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own website and the general plan its council adopted, published on the state public notice website; the North Davis Fire District and the North Davis Sewer District; the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll; the Census Bureau's geocoder and its 2020 block file; and the state's own roads and municipal boundary layers. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
Start here
Almost everything strange about this town comes off one line drawn down the middle of it.
Sunset is a rectangle. It measures about 1.9 miles from its south line to its north line and about 0.8 miles across, and the state municipal boundary polygon works out at roughly 1.47 square miles, measured on 16 August 2026. Down the long axis of that rectangle, a little east of centre, runs Interstate 15. Hold that one alignment in your head and four separate facts about this place stop being separate facts.
West of the freeway is the city almost everybody means when they say Sunset: a grid of numbered streets, about 2,420 parcels on the Davis County Assessor's roll, a median year built of 1960, and a general plan that puts 94.5 per cent of the city's land in residential use. East of the freeway, still inside the municipal line, is Air Force ground. Roughly 255 acres of Hill Air Force Base is legally in Sunset, which is about a quarter of the whole city, and the boundary page takes that apart source by source.
The other two follow immediately. Main Street runs a matter of yards west of the freeway, close enough that the city's own adopted general plan says the corridor built in the 1960s "required the destruction of the east side of Main Street", and the street page is about what that left behind. And the western city limit is a railroad, the same corridor the community separated from Clinton along in about 1916, with commuter rail running on it now and no station in the city. The name page carries that half.
Sunset at a glance
5,475
counted at the 2020 decennial census
1.47 sq mi
measured on the state boundary polygon
255 acres
of the installation inside the city limits
1960
the median year built on the county tax roll
The arithmetic
Down, then up, then down again, which is not the curve a Wasatch Front city is supposed to have.
Four population figures exist for this city from primary sources, and read in order they make a shape almost nowhere else on this side of the state has. Two of them are in the city's own adopted general plan, one is the decennial count, and one is the current estimate on the state's municipal boundary feature. The city hub prints only the third.
| Year | People | Where the figure comes from | What was underneath it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 5,204 | Sunset City General Plan, Table 1, citing the U.S. Census Bureau | A built out grid with essentially no undeveloped ground left inside the line |
| 2010 | 5,122 | Sunset City General Plan, Table 1, citing the U.S. Census Bureau | Down 82 on the decade. The same plan gives 1,826 housing units in the same year |
| 2020 | 5,475 | U.S. Census decennial count, corroborated on the state municipal boundary layer, checked 16 August 2026 | Up 353, which is the only rising decade in the set |
| Latest estimate | 5,372 | Population estimate attribute on the state's municipal boundary feature for Sunset, checked 16 August 2026 | Down about 103 on the count, which puts this city among the Davis County cities losing residents |
The 2000 and 2010 rows are the city's own, as printed in Table 1 of the general plan its council adopted on 15 November 2022. The 2020 row is the decennial count. The estimate is the most recent published figure on the state layer rather than a figure for this year. What a home here costs lives on the practical city guide.
Three things follow from that column and none of them is on a relocation summary. The first is density. The city's own plan carries the 2010 Census land area of 1.31 square miles and a density of 3,909.9 people per square mile, and that figure is computed across the whole municipal area including the ground the plan says the Air Force controls. Strip that quarter out and the density of the part with houses on it is higher still. This is a small city that is not a spacious one.
The second is that the flat line is structural rather than a phase. There is nowhere to put anything. A railroad closes the west side, another municipality closes the south side, the county line closes the north side, and the east side is a federal installation. The general plan puts 94.5 per cent of the city's land in residential use, with commercial concentrated along Main Street and small pockets on 1300 North and 1800 North, which is the numeric version of a town with no room for a second act.
The third is the age of what is here, and it is the single most useful number a buyer can carry into a showing. On the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll, checked on 16 August 2026, 2,256 Sunset parcels carry a year built and the median is 1960. The two dominant decades are the 1950s at 34.2 per cent and the 1960s at 29.1 per cent, so 71.5 per cent of the taxed parcels here predate 1970. That does not make the housing good or bad. It makes the panel, the sewer lateral, the roof and the windows the first four questions rather than the last four.
One tail worth naming, because the flat population line hides it. About 248 parcels on that same roll, roughly eleven per cent, carry a year of 2010 or later. A city with almost no vacant land still put up eleven per cent of its parcel count in sixteen years, which is infill happening inside an existing grid rather than growth arriving at the edge. The mover page works through what that means for an address.
The long view
Four names before this one, a bishop with a question in 1916, and a freeway that took a street apart in the 1960s.
The city's own account of itself is better than anything written about it from outside, and it is not on the city website. It is in section 2.3 of the general plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022, published as a PDF on the state public notice website. It opens by saying that this area "was first known as Sandridge, the range, the basin, and summit", that the land is an alluvial delta formed by the Weber River with fertile soil and no natural surface water, and that it was described as undulating and dry, covered with sage brush, rabbit brush and grass. Four names, and a landform that explains why water is the whole early story here.
Settlement came later than most people assume. The plan says the land was being grazed as early as 1854 but "did not receive settlers until the 1870's when the James Hill family arrived", and it puts their home and farm at approximately 85 West 1800 North. It names Peter Terry, Chauncy Hadlock, Mark Elmer, James Burnett, Thomas Steele, James Mitchell and Durban Terry as the other early families, records that they hauled drinking water from the Weber River and then sank wells a hundred feet deep, and says the area blossomed when irrigation water became available at the completion of the Davis and Weber canal in 1884.
Then the name, and the order of it is the part almost every retelling gets backwards. In about 1896 the area was called Clinton. In about 1916 the community's first bishop, Orlando Hadlock, asked three women to find a new name, one of them proposed Sunset after a sunset she had watched the night before, and the community separated from Clinton along the Union Pacific Railroad tracks shortly afterwards. The name came first and the separation followed. The name page has all four people, the spelling the city's own document cannot settle, and the fact that the 1916 line is still the city line.
The last two turns are one paragraph in the plan and they are the two that built the town you would drive through today. "Sunset City was incorporated in 1935. The development of Hill Air Force Base directly to the east of the City in the 1940's changed the nature of Sunset from agricultural to residential." Then the 1960s brought both an onslaught of residential development and the freeway, which the plan says "required the destruction of the east side of Main Street and substantially changed the character of Sunset City". A city government wrote that sentence into its own governing document and has left it there through at least two revisions.
One structural thing about that record is worth flagging, because it changes how anybody should research this town. Sunset's best primary source is not on the city website. It is a 26 page PDF on the state public notice website, and where the two disagree the website is usually the one that is wrong. The website says SR-26 is Main Street and the plan says SR-126. The website gives a naming story with a lake in it and no names in it; the plan gives four names and no lake. The website gives a city width the boundary polygon does not support. Anyone writing about Sunset from its website alone will reproduce all three errors, and most of what is in circulation does.
It is also worth recording what a full read of this city's published record does not turn up, because a short list is a finding rather than a gap. There is no canyon, no creek, no pond, no reservoir, no lake edge and no trail system inside the municipal line. No property in Sunset has surfaced on the National Register. There is no temple, no museum, no library and no cemetery inside the boundary, no farmers market, no recreation or aquatic centre, and no named commercial district beyond the Main Street strip. What this city has instead is an outline, and the outline is genuinely more interesting than most towns' amenity lists.
A grazing range, then four names, then a town that separated along a railroad, then a base on its east side and a freeway down its middle. The whole sequence fits in one paragraph of the city's own plan.
The county
One county subject reaches this address, and it reaches it through the city limits rather than through a gate.
Davis County keeps seven subjects at county level so that fifteen towns are not each writing their own version of the same island, the same wetland and the same paved corridor. Sunset has a genuine stake in exactly one of the seven. The other six are named here, with where each actually sits, and each links to the guide that covers it.
The installation itself
Hill Air Force Base
What the base is, what it flies, what it employs, how its entrances work and what its published noise contours mean for a house.
Read the guideThis city's door onto it
The city limits and the base
Not a gate. A municipal boundary drawn inside the installation, with about a quarter of the city on the far side of it.
Read the pageSix of the seven county subjects have no relationship to an address in Sunset beyond a drive time, and saying so plainly beats inventing one. Antelope Island is reached from the Syracuse causeway, well southwest of here across two other cities. The Legacy Parkway Trail runs through the south end of the county and has no trailhead and no segment anywhere near this city. The bench canyons are ten miles east of a town that sits on a river delta at about 4,500 feet and touches no part of the mountain front. Farmington Bay and its birding ground are at the wrong end of the county entirely. The county's walkable water edges are ponds and reservoirs in other cities, and the three parks here are grid parks with no water in them. And family weekends in this county are priced around paid attractions, none of which is in Sunset; the parks page links that guide once and takes nothing from it. All seven are indexed on the Davis County hub.
If you only have one day
A street with one side, a park with three lives, a boundary you cannot cross and a railroad you can stand on.
First thing
Stand on Main Street facing east
The interstate is behind the buildings rather than over a field. Twenty five thousand vehicles a day on one side of you and a hundred and twenty five thousand on the other. Free, and ten minutes.
The street pageMid morning
Walk into Central Park
The city's oldest address is now its largest bowery, and the general plan is what explains how it got there. Free, and about an hour.
The parks pageMidday
Work out where the city ends
It does not end at the freeway. It ends about a fifth of a mile east of it, on a line drawn inside a closed installation. Free, and half an hour with a map.
The boundary pageLate afternoon
Find the western city limit
A rail corridor with commuter trains on it, and the same line a community drew to separate itself from Clinton in about 1916. Free, and twenty minutes.
The name pageThe rhythm
One annual event, two council meetings a month, and a green waste season that is the only season the city publishes.
Sunset City Fun Days is the city's own celebration and it is the single annual fixture on the calendar. The 2026 edition ran on 17 and 18 July 2026 at Rachael Runyan Memorial Park, 975 North 200 West, and the city's own event page now says the event has passed. That is written in the past tense here because that is where it is. No date for 2027 is published anywhere, and the only detailed running order the city has ever put online is from 2023, at a different pair of parks, so none of its times or entry fees are repeated on this companion as current.
The civic rhythm is steadier and easier to plan around. The city publishes that council meets on the first and third Tuesday of every month at 6:30pm at City Hall, 200 West 1300 North, and its events calendar lists each meeting individually. Sunset is governed by a mayor and five council members: Mayor Scott Wiggill, with Nakisha Rigley, Nancy Smalling, Ricky Carlson, Hope Thompson and Katherine Hunter on the council, all current as of 16 August 2026. Municipal elections next fall in November 2027. The city also runs a youth city council and was recruiting for it in August 2026.
The rest of the year is small and mostly practical. The city's utility page publishes the one genuine season it has: green waste collection runs from 1 April to 30 November, at $7.89 a month, and outside those dates it does not run. Trash and recycling days alternate week by week and are on the city calendar. There is a landfill voucher and neighborhood dumpster programme, dog licences, business licences and building permits, all through the same office at 200 West 1300 North. The council's next scheduled meeting after this page was written is 18 August 2026.
For anything with a rule attached, go to the ordinances rather than a summary page. Sunset's codified code is hosted at American Legal Publishing, and that is the route to a fireworks question, a parking question, an animal question, a nuisance question or a short term rental question. It is a primary source, it is current, and it is a better answer than any city web page or any relocation guide, this one included.
The city's own website and the city's own adopted plan contradict each other on two facts, and on both of them the plan is right. The city information page calls Main Street "SR-26". The adopted general plan says "Main Street/SR 126" and the state's roads data, which carries the transportation department's own route attributes, returns SR 126 for every Main Street segment in the city; SR-26 is Riverdale Road up in Weber County and does not touch Sunset. The same city page also says Sunset is "1.9 miles by .6 of a mile", and the boundary polygon is 0.75 to 0.85 miles wide for its whole length and never as narrow as 0.6. Both were checked on 16 August 2026. Where a city's website and its adopted plan disagree, read the plan, and where the plan and the state data disagree on a road, read the data.
The Sunset companion
Five pages, and four of them start from the same line on the map.
Everything The Local has written about Sunset itself: the quarter of the city that is federal ground and the standing policy that would take the rest of it, the street the freeway took half of and the route number the city's own website gets wrong, the three women who named the place and the railroad that drew its western line, the three parks and the fifteen dollar bowery, and what an address here actually asks of a household in a city that runs its own police force and buys almost everything else in.
Quick answers
Sunset, answered.
For being small, for being old, and for containing part of an Air Force base. The city covers about 1.47 square miles at the top of Davis County, roughly a quarter of that is Hill Air Force Base ground lying inside the municipal line, and the taxed remainder is a grid of about 2,420 parcels whose median year built is 1960. Its general plan puts 94.5 per cent of its land in residential use. Its name comes from about 1916, when the community's first bishop asked three women to find one, and the separation from Clinton followed along the railroad tracks.
Both, and the second half is the part almost nobody prints. The installation continues east well beyond the city, but the municipal boundary is drawn inside it rather than along its edge, so a slice of the base is legally in Sunset. Fourteen 2020 census blocks from the special land use tract the Census Bureau reserves for military installations have their interior points inside the city polygon, and they total about 255 acres, or roughly a quarter of the city. The city's own general plan describes a strip on the east as currently being controlled by the United States Air Force.
About 1.47 square miles measured on the state's municipal boundary polygon on 16 August 2026, and 1.31 square miles by the Census land area figure the city's own plan carries. It runs about 1.89 miles from its south line to its north line and between 0.75 and 0.85 miles across. The city's website says 1.9 miles by .6 of a mile; the length checks out and the width does not, because the polygon is never as narrow as 0.6 miles anywhere along it. The honest figure is the range with each source named, not an average of them.
No, on both counts that usually matter. The residential city uses 84015, which is Clearfield's, and the eastern part of the city sits in 84056 with a Hill AFB postal community, so a single small city spans two ZIP codes and owns neither. Nor does it have its own address grid: in the state's authoritative roads layer, 329 of the 333 road segments in Sunset carry an address system of Clearfield and the remaining four carry Hill Air Force Base, and not one carries Sunset. That is why a Sunset address reads 1300 North or 2300 North rather than counting from a centre of its own.
SR-126. The state's roads layer, which carries the transportation department's own route attributes, returns a highway name of SR 126 for every Main Street segment inside the city, and the general plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022 says Main Street/SR 126 is an example of an arterial street. The city's own website is where the other figure comes from: its city information page calls SR-26 the city's Main Street. SR-26 is Riverdale Road, in Weber County, running through Riverdale, Ogden and South Ogden, and it does not touch Sunset at any point.
Settlers arrived in the 1870s and the city incorporated in 1935, both from the city's own general plan. The plan says the land was grazed as early as 1854 but received no settlers until the 1870s, when the James Hill family arrived and farmed at approximately 85 West 1800 North. It then gives 1935 for incorporation in a single flat sentence. A settlement date of about 1916 is in circulation and it is wrong: 1916 is the year the area took the name Sunset and separated from Clinton, which is a naming and a boundary, not a founding.
Somewhere around 4,500 to 4,540 feet, and there is no single settled figure. Spot elevations on federal geographic names records for features inside the city run from 4,498 feet to 4,537 feet, with the ground east of the freeway higher at about 4,596 feet. The city's own information page says 4,560 feet. A figure of 4,531 feet is in wide circulation and traces to an encyclopedia rather than to any issuing body, so it is not printed here. The range is the honest figure; any single number for a city is a simplification.
No. The 2020 decennial census counted 5,475 residents and the most recent estimate on the state's municipal boundary layer is 5,372, down about 103. The longer curve is stranger than that: the city's own plan carries 5,204 in 2000 and 5,122 in 2010, so Sunset lost residents across the 2000s, gained them across the 2010s and is losing them again. The reason is structural rather than temporary. A railroad closes the west side, a municipality the south, a county line the north, and a federal installation the east, inside about 1.47 square miles.
One of the seven. Sunset's only genuine county subject is Hill Air Force Base, and its door onto it is the municipal boundary rather than an entrance, because the boundary is drawn inside the installation. It has no relationship to Antelope Island, which is reached from a causeway well to the southwest, to the Legacy Parkway Trail at the south end of the county, to the bench canyons ten miles east, to the Farmington Bay wetlands, or to the county's walkable water edges, because there is no water edge inside the city and its three parks are grid parks.
Five pages on a city that is smaller than it looks and older than it looks.
Sunset asks a buyer a short, specific set of questions, and almost none of them are the questions a listing answers. What decade was this house built in, given a citywide median year built of 1960. Which side of the freeway does the parcel sit on, and how far east does the city line actually run. Which of two ZIP codes and whose address grid does this address use. What does a city that runs its own police department and buys its fire cover, its street numbering and its train station from its neighbors actually provide. Tell me what you are weighing and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who works this end of the county, 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.