City Woods Cross, Davis County
A small city on the south Davis flats, named for a railroad crossing in 1869
Woods Cross, and the things named for it that are somewhere else.
11,410 people at the 2020 decennial census on 3.83 square miles of valley floor at roughly 4,249 feet, two city boundaries north of the Salt Lake County line. The refinery that carries this city's name operates in West Bountiful, the airport the federal record files under Bountiful sits inside these city limits, and the pond at the end of 1600 North straddles the seam. Six pages on the city itself, plus pointers to the four county subjects a Woods Cross address actually uses.
My own ground is Southern Utah, four hours south of here, so these pages are researched rather than lived. Every figure on them was read at the body that issues it: the city code and the city budget notices, the Census boundary files, the state transit, wildlife and environment agencies, the county clerk, and the federal aviation and chemical safety records. Each one carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent handles the work on the ground.
Start here
Half the things called Woods Cross are not entirely in Woods Cross.
Start with the strangest fact about this city, because it explains more than any description of the streets would. The freeway exit signed for Woods Cross at 2600 South runs a line that belongs mostly to two other cities. The refinery known everywhere as the Woods Cross Refinery operates in West Bountiful. The pond at the west end of 1600 North has its published address in one city and its parking lot in another. And the airport the federal record describes as three miles southwest of Bountiful sits inside the Woods Cross city limits. Every one of those was run through the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder on 15 August 2026 rather than taken from a mailing address, and every one came back the way it is written here.
The reason is postal and historical rather than mysterious. The 84087 postal code covers Woods Cross and West Bountiful together, the rail stop that gave the city its name in 1869 sat on ground that was then unincorporated, and the city boundary that eventually got drawn around all of it is irregular enough that a single street can change cities between one block and the next. Nothing about this is a defect. It is simply the thing a person moving here has to hold in their head, because a listing, a review and a county record can all be talking about three different municipalities while using one name.
What is genuinely inside the line is a small, built out, flat city of about 11,410 people on 3.83 square miles at roughly 4,249 feet, with its own police department, its own parks code, its own dedicated parks tax and its own commuter rail platform. It is also, on the state's own estimate, a city that lost population in the 2023 to 2024 estimate year rather than gaining it, which makes it a very different product from the north Davis cities still adding subdivisions.
Woods Cross at a glance
11,410
counted at the 2020 decennial census
3.83 sq mi
of valley floor at roughly 4,249 feet
1869
the year a rail crossing gave the place its name
234
flight operations a day at the field inside the city
The layout
Four north to south strips and the freeway cuts between two of them.
Woods Cross reads on a map as a rectangle and works on the ground as four long strips running north and south, each with a different use, a different noise floor and a different set of things to check before an offer. Sorting them is the single most useful thing anyone can do before driving around here, and it is the part no relocation listicle attempts.
| The east grid | The 800 West spine | The industrial west | The flats beyond Legacy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it is | Between the Bountiful line and the freeway, on the older residential grid | The civic corridor on 800 West, from City Hall at 1555 South up to the rail platform at 750 South | West of the tracks, on and around 1100 West and 500 South | West of Legacy Parkway, out toward 1600 North, 2100 West and the wetlands |
| What is on it | Houses, Woods Cross Elementary at 745 West 1100 South, and the streets that feel most like Bountiful | City Hall, Hogan Park with its two pioneer markers and its log cabin, the FrontRunner station and its two free lots | The Silver Eagle plant at 2355 South 1100 West, Skypark Airport at 1887 South 1800 West, and the freight and warehouse ground | Mountain View Park and the Valentine Estates walkway onto the Legacy corridor, the Legacy Nature Preserve, and the pond on the West Bountiful seam |
| What it sounds like | Ordinary residential streets with the freeway as a constant background west of them | Train horns and platform announcements at the north end, city traffic on 800 West | Plant and freight noise, and a single runway on a north to south alignment overhead | Open, wind driven and quiet, with the parkway as the loudest thing in earshot |
| What to check | Which junior high a specific address feeds, because the city sits between two of them | The city hall and park rebuild schedule, which changes what is usable on that block | Distance from the corridor, prevailing wind, and the published air quality record for the county | Which city a parcel is actually in, because the boundary crosses 1600 North between 1275 West and 1610 West |
| Where it is written | Woods Cross or Bountiful | Hogan Park and The Station Area Plan | Silver Eagle and the name, and Skypark Airport | The Legacy Parkway Trail and The lakeside parks, both county pages |
Addresses as published by Woods Cross City, the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder and the Federal Aviation Administration, checked 15 August 2026. The boundary result on 1600 North comes from the geocoder check described above, which is why the fourth column carries a warning rather than an assurance. Prices and current listings live on the practical city guide.
The city guide says the parks here are dog friendly with off leash access near the trailhead, and the city parks code says the opposite. Woods Cross Municipal Code 8-06-080, in the September 2020 codification retrieved from the city on 15 August 2026, reads that except as provided in the section no person shall lead, let loose or bring any animal of any species in any city park, with an exception for a service animal accompanying its owner and an exception for city approved events featuring animals. Animals other than service animals found in a park are subject to pick up by the animal control officer. Against that, the city's own recreation, arts and parks tax material lists dog parks among the things the tax has funded. Both cannot be current. Until the city resolves it in writing, plan on the code, not on the guide, and call Community Services on 801-292-4421 before you take a dog to a Woods Cross park.
The long view
A burial ground in 1849, a railroad crossing in 1869, and a name that stuck by accident.
The oldest documented thing on this ground is a grave. In the early summer of 1849 the first known death occurred in what was then Sessions Settlement, and a plot on what is now West 1500 South was chosen as the burial ground. The first burial was Charles Peter Hogan, the eighteen month old son of Eric and Halga Hogan, and by the account on the Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker raised there in 1940, nearly a score of people were eventually buried on the block. The settlers later moved their cemetery because sub irrigation made the site unworkable, which is to say the high water table on these flats defeated a graveyard a hundred and seventy five years before it started showing up in a buyer's due diligence. The Hogan Park page carries the markers, the cabin and the rebuild now landing on the same block.
The name arrived twenty years after the graves. Daniel Wood, who reached the Salt Lake Valley on 20 September 1848 and had built an adobe house here by 1850, gave the lower portion of his farm for a depot and crossing when the Utah Central Railroad came through in 1869. The stop was called Woods Crossing and was shortened to Woods Cross, and the town tells a story, which is folklore rather than record, about Wood hearing a conductor call the name and answering that he was indeed cross. The railroad itself is worth a beat: construction began at Ogden on 17 May 1869 and reached Salt Lake City on 10 January 1870, and it was locally financed and built without federal subsidy.
What followed was food. The Woods Cross Canning and Pickling Company started in 1892 and reorganized as the Woods Cross Canning Company in January 1912, and canning rather than sugar is the industrial chapter this city actually has. The refineries came later and are the reason most people know the name at all, and they are also the reason the name misleads: the large one is in West Bountiful and the one inside the city limits is a small specialty plant that has been running since 1954.
The civic timeline is where the sources fall out with each other, and it is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. The Utah History Encyclopedia and the city guide say the city was chartered in 1935. The city's own police department history page says Woods Cross was officially incorporated in 1936 with a water board and town council. This companion prints both with their sources and picks neither, because the issuing body and the encyclopedia disagree and only the City Recorder can settle it. The same page dates the police department to 1960, when the city appointed its first town marshal, Niles Stahle, and notes that by 1968 a newly built City Hall had become police headquarters. That 1968 building is the one being replaced now.
The settlers moved their cemetery off these flats because the ground was too wet to keep it. The same water table is still the first thing to ask about on a west side parcel.
The county
Four Davis subjects reach this doorstep and three of them do not.
Davis County carries seven subjects written once for all fifteen cities. Woods Cross has a real stake in four of them and a two mile drive to nothing at all in the other three, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. The four below are the ones a Woods Cross address actually uses.
Out the west side
The Legacy Parkway Trail
Woods Cross helps manage this corridor and has two doors onto it, and the county page has the trailheads, the water stops and the mileage.
Read the guideThe water edges
The lakeside parks
Where the county's ponds are, what each allows, and the algae advisory that has been running on the nearest one all summer.
Read the guideDays out
Family weekends in Davis County
What a paid day out in this county costs and what hours it keeps, which from here is a drive north rather than a walk.
Read the guideThe birds
Farmington Bay and the birding
The county's wetland birding, its seasonal closures and the access permit rule that took effect on 1 July 2026.
Read the guideThree more county subjects belong to other parts of Davis, and this city has nothing but a drive time to offer on any of them. The island and its causeway are reached from Syracuse, twenty five miles north. The bench canyons and the trailheads at their mouths belong to the cities that sit under them, starting with Bountiful two miles east; Woods Cross owns no canyon, no bench and no trailhead in the Wasatch, and its own outdoor ground faces the other way, west toward the trail and the wetlands. The air force base is at the far north end of the county. All seven subjects are indexed on the Davis County hub, and this companion links them rather than rewriting them.
If you only have one day
A day here is one block, one field and a look at the west side.
First thing
Read the two markers
One block at 750 West 1500 South holds an 1849 burial ground, a log cabin built in the late 1850s and moved twice, and two Daughters of Utah Pioneers markers. Free, and about thirty minutes.
The Hogan Park pageLate morning
Watch the pattern at Skypark
A privately owned public use field with one asphalt runway, 256 based aircraft and an average of 234 operations a day, inside a city of 11,410 people.
The airport pageMidday
Stand on the platform
One island platform at 750 South 800 West, two free lots, no Sunday service, and a state mandated plan that had to reckon with a refinery inside its own half mile circle.
The station pageAfternoon
Take the west door out
Mountain View Park and the Valentine Estates walkway both put you on the paved corridor that runs the length of south Davis without a stoplight.
The county trail pageThe rhythm
There is no city celebration week here, and that is a finding rather than an omission.
Bountiful has Handcart Days on 24 and 25 July. Clinton and Syracuse both run a Heritage Days. Woods Cross runs neither, and the city calendar, checked 15 August 2026, carried council meetings on 18 August and 1 September, a Citizen Corps meeting on 25 August and a youth city council blood drive at Public Works on 24 August, and nothing resembling a summer festival. A companion that manufactured an events page here would be inventing one, so this one does not have one.
What the city does run is Christmas in the Park, held in Hogan Park with a tree lighting, caroling and a visit from Santa, and it has run for decades. The date moves and the listings that circulate for it are aggregator dates, so take it from the city calendar in the autumn rather than from a search result. The largest event physically held inside Woods Cross is not the city's at all: it is the aviation festival at Skypark, run by the airport, free to attend, and billed by its own operator as Utah's largest annual aviation event, which is the operator's claim rather than an independent finding.
What does govern an ordinary year here is weather rather than a calendar of events. The city sits on the valley floor, roughly fifty to sixty vertical feet above the historic surface of the Great Salt Lake, low enough that the whole south Davis basin shares the winter inversion season with the metro to the south. Two other pages carry that properly rather than this one: the federal air quality designations that apply to this county, and how to weigh them beside an industrial corridor, are set out on the refineries page, and the inversion itself is a Salt Lake County subject, written once on the valley in winter page rather than described again here.
The other seasonal fact worth carrying is the one on the water. Bountiful Pond, at the west end of 1600 North on the seam between this city and West Bountiful, has been under a harmful algal bloom warning from the Utah Division of Water Quality through the summer of 2026, updated on 12 June, 7 July and 3 August with the same finding each time. The guidance is that algae mats are present, that people should not touch or swallow them and should keep dogs and children out of the water, and that wading, paddling and fishing are acceptable. The county lakeside parks page owns the pond and carries the rest of it.
A city of eleven thousand people with a commuter rail platform, a working refinery, an airport and no summer festival is an unusual thing, and the honest version says so.
The Woods Cross companion
Seven pages, and four of them turn on where a line is drawn.
Everything The Local has written about Woods Cross itself: the block that holds the settlement's first graves and is about to be rebuilt, the airport nobody counts as this city's, the sales tax that buys the parks, the half mile circle the state made the city plan around a refinery, the two plants and the name they share, and what a Woods Cross address changes against the neighbor everything here is named after.
Quick answers
Woods Cross, answered.
Mostly for a refinery that is not in it. The plant known everywhere as the Woods Cross Refinery operates in West Bountiful, and the smaller plant that is genuinely inside the city limits is Silver Eagle, which has run on this ground since 1954. Beyond that the city is known for its FrontRunner station, the only commuter rail stop in south Davis, and among people who fly for Skypark Airport, a privately owned public use field inside the city that the federal record describes as three miles southwest of Bountiful.
On the valley floor of south Davis County, hemmed in by Bountiful to the east, West Bountiful to the north and west, and North Salt Lake to the south. It does not touch the Salt Lake County line, because North Salt Lake lies between. The city covers about 3.83 square miles at roughly 4,249 feet, which puts it around fifty to sixty vertical feet above the historic surface of the Great Salt Lake, and that is why the far west side of the city is flats and wetland rather than bench.
No. The HF Sinclair Woods Cross Refinery, a 45,000 barrel a day plant, has its addresses at 1070 West 500 South and 393 South 800 West, and both of them return West Bountiful city from the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder, checked on 15 August 2026. The refinery that is inside Woods Cross is Silver Eagle Refining at 2355 South 1100 West, a much smaller specialty plant. The shared 84087 postal code is the mechanical reason the mailing addresses disagree with the city limits.
Yes, and it is one of the least known facts about the city. Skypark Airport, identifier BTF, sits at 1887 South 1800 West and its published coordinates return Woods Cross city from the Census Bureau geocoder. It is privately owned by Skypark Airport Assoc., LLC and open to public use, with one asphalt runway 4,634 by 70 feet, 256 based aircraft and 85,468 aircraft operations in the twelve months ending 20 September 2023, an average of 234 a day, all of it general aviation.
From a railroad crossing on one farm. Daniel Wood gave the lower portion of his farm for a depot and crossing when the Utah Central Railroad came through in 1869, and the stop was called Woods Crossing before it was shortened to Woods Cross. The town also tells a story about Wood returning by train in 1870, hearing a conductor call the name and answering that he was indeed cross, which is folklore rather than a documented event and is worth repeating only as the story the town tells about itself.
The sources disagree and the city disagrees with itself, so this companion prints both. The Utah History Encyclopedia, which the practical city guide follows, gives a charter in 1935. The city's own police department history page states that Woods Cross was officially incorporated in 1936 with a water board and town council. A charter in one year and an effective incorporation the next is a common Utah pattern and would explain it, but that is a hypothesis rather than a finding, and only the City Recorder can settle it.
It does, at 750 South 800 West, and it is the only FrontRunner station in south Davis County. It opened on 26 April 2008 with one island platform serving two tracks and two free park and ride lots holding somewhere between 230 and 235 spaces depending on which published count you read. The service pattern matters more than the platform: FrontRunner runs Monday through Saturday with no Sunday service, roughly every thirty minutes at weekday peak and every sixty minutes off peak and all day Saturday.
A recreation, arts and parks sales tax of 0.1 per cent, which the city describes as one penny for every ten dollars spent, and which is not charged on food, gas or pharmacy items. Voters approved it in 2009, the first funds arrived in 2010, and the city says it has generated nearly 4.9 million dollars from 2010 through 2024 with about 520,000 dollars expected in 2025. Utah law requires reauthorization every ten years, and Woods Cross voters renewed it on 4 November 2025 by 1,322 votes to 435.
The municipal code says no, and the answer needs checking with the city before you rely on it either way. Woods Cross Municipal Code 8-06-080, in the September 2020 codification, provides that no person shall lead, let loose or bring any animal of any species into any city park, excepting a service animal accompanying its owner and city approved events featuring animals, and that other animals found in a park are subject to pick up by the animal control officer. The city's own parks tax material, however, lists dog parks among the things that tax has funded. Call 801-292-4421 and get the current answer.
Six pages on the city, and a boundary that decides most of them.
A day in Woods Cross is a block of pioneer markers, a runway, a rail platform and a look west at the wetlands. An address here asks a narrower set of questions: which of the four strips a street sits in, how far it is from the corridor and which way the wind runs, whether the parcel is genuinely inside the city line or across it, what the city hall and park rebuild does to that block between now and 2028, and what the proposed change to the city's own property tax levy means on a tax notice. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works south Davis every week, 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.