City Woods Cross, Davis County
A small, flat city on the south Davis valley floor, named for an 1869 railroad crossing
Woods Cross, Utah, the crossroads town on the south Davis flats
About 11,410 people on under four square miles of valley floor at roughly 4,249 feet, wedged between Bountiful, West Bountiful and North Salt Lake. It is the only town in south Davis with a FrontRunner platform, and it took its name from a rail crossing a settler gave to the tracks in 1869. Seven Local pages cover the city itself, from a pioneer burial ground to the airport most people never notice.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
Woods Cross is a small, flat crossroads city on the valley floor at the south end of Davis County, about eleven thousand people packed into under four square miles between Bountiful, West Bountiful and North Salt Lake. It is a working town rather than a scenic one. A FrontRunner platform, a pair of oil refineries, a general aviation airport and an industrial west edge all sit inside or against its borders, while the bench and the canyons that define its neighbors belong to Bountiful next door. What it offers a buyer is location: a short freeway run from downtown Salt Lake City, the only commuter rail stop in south Davis, and homes that have long been a step down in price from the bench streets a mile east. This hub is the map to seven deeper pages, and it hands the county trail, the lake edges and the birding to the wider Davis County pages the valley towns share.
Woods Cross at a glance
11,410
people at the 2020 census
3.83 sq mi
of valley floor at roughly 4,249 feet
1869
the rail crossing that named the town
1 of 1
the only FrontRunner stop in south Davis
The lay of the land
Four long strips, and the freeway splits two of them
Woods Cross looks like a rectangle on a map and works on the ground as four strips running north and south, each with a different use and a different noise floor. Sorting them out is the single most useful thing you can do before you drive around here, and it is the part no relocation listicle bothers with.
The east strip, between the Bountiful line and the freeway, is the older residential grid. It holds most of the houses, Woods Cross Elementary at 745 West 1100 South, and the streets that feel the most like Bountiful, with the freeway as a constant hum to the west. Next comes the civic spine along 800 West, which runs from City Hall up to the FrontRunner platform at 750 South and its two free lots, and carries the train horns and the platform announcements at its north end. West of the tracks is the industrial strip, on and around 1100 West and 500 South, where the Silver Eagle refinery, Skypark Airport and the freight and warehouse ground sit together; expect plant and freight noise and a single runway overhead. Then, west of the Legacy Parkway, the land opens into flats and wetland toward 1600 North and the county nature preserve, quiet except for the wind and the parkway.
What to check depends on the strip. On the east grid it is which junior high a specific address feeds, because the city sits between two of them. On the west side it is distance from the industrial corridor, which way the wind runs, and, out past Legacy, which city a parcel is actually in, because the boundary weaves back and forth across 1600 North and a west side address can turn out to be West Bountiful. Prices and current listings sit on the Woods Cross city guide, and the comparison with Bountiful walks the trade against the bench town next door.
Dogs and city parks send a mixed message here, so ask before you rely on it. The city guide calls the parks dog friendly, but the city's own parks ordinance bars animals of any species from city parks, with service animals and city approved events the only exceptions. Confusingly, the city's parks tax material lists dog parks among what the tax has paid for. Until the city settles it, plan on the ordinance and call the city at 801-292-4421 before you bring a dog to a Woods Cross park.
The long view
A burial ground in 1849, a railroad crossing in 1869
The oldest documented thing on this ground is a grave. In the early summer of 1849 the settlement then called Sessions Settlement lost one of its own, and a plot on what is now West 1500 South became the burial ground. The first laid to rest there 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 in 1940, close to a score of people were eventually buried on the block. The settlers later moved their cemetery because the ground was too wet to keep it, which is to say the high water table on these flats defeated a graveyard well over a century before it started showing up in a buyer's due diligence. The Hogan Park page carries the markers, the moved log cabin and the block itself.
The name arrived twenty years after the graves. Daniel Wood, who reached the Salt Lake Valley in the autumn of 1848 and had built an adobe house here by 1850, gave the lower part 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 soon shortened to Woods Cross. The town still tells a story, more folklore than record, about Wood hearing a conductor call the name and answering that he was indeed cross. The railroad itself is worth a beat: it was built north from Salt Lake City to Ogden in 1869 and 1870, locally financed and without federal subsidy, and the crossing on Wood's farm is why the town exists where it does. The naming page carries the crossing and the two refineries that made the name famous.
What followed was food, not oil. The Woods Cross Canning and Pickling Company started in 1892 and reorganized as the Woods Cross Canning Company in 1912, and canning is the industrial chapter this city actually has. The refineries came later and are the reason most people know the name at all. They are also why the name misleads, because the large plant everyone calls the Woods Cross Refinery sits in West Bountiful, and the one genuinely inside the city is Silver Eagle, a small specialty plant running since 1954.
The civic timeline is short. The town was chartered in 1935 and had a water board and a town council by 1936. Its police department dates to 1960, when the city named its first town marshal, and by 1968 it had built the City Hall that doubled as police headquarters. That 1968 building is the one the city is replacing now, on the same civic block along 800 West.
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 lot.
Around the county
The Davis County days out a Woods Cross address actually uses
Davis County has a handful of subjects written once for all its cities. Woods Cross has a real stake in four of them, and a drive to the rest. These four are the ones you can reach from here without much thought.
Out the west side
The Legacy Parkway Trail
Woods Cross has two doors onto this paved corridor, and the county page has the trailheads, the water stops and the mileage.
Read the guide
The water edges
The lakeside parks
Where the county's ponds are and what each one allows, including Bountiful Pond on the seam at the west end of 1600 North.
Read the guide
Days 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 short drive north.
Read the guide
The birds
Farmington Bay and the birding
The county's wetland birding, its seasonal closures and its access rules, a short way up the flats from here.
Read the guideThe county's marquee outings belong to other towns, and Woods Cross has only a drive time to offer on them. The island and its causeway are reached from Syracuse, well to the north. The bench canyons and their trailheads belong to the cities that sit under them, starting with Bountiful two miles east; Woods Cross owns no canyon and no bench, 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 of the county subjects are indexed on the Davis County hub, and the Davis canyons page carries the ones that belong to the bench towns.
The rhythm of a year
Winter inversions, a tree lighting, and an airshow bigger than the town
Woods Cross does not throw itself a summer festival the way Bountiful does with Handcart Days, or the way Clinton and Syracuse do with their Heritage Days. What the city runs instead is Christmas in the Park, held at Hogan Park with a tree lighting, caroling and a visit from Santa, and it has run for decades. The date moves from year to year, so take it from the city rather than from a search result in the autumn. 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 operator as Utah's largest annual aviation event.
What really governs a year here is weather more than a calendar. The city sits low on the valley floor, only fifty to sixty feet above the old shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, low enough that the whole south Davis basin shares the winter inversion season with the metro to the south. The federal air quality picture for the county, and how to weigh it beside an industrial corridor, sits on the refineries page, and the inversion itself is written once for the whole region on the valley in winter page rather than repeated 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 Woods Cross and West Bountiful, has a habit of going under a harmful algal bloom advisory in high summer. When it does, 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, while wading, paddling and fishing stay fine. The county lakeside parks page owns the pond and carries the rest.
A city of eleven thousand people with a rail platform, a working refinery, an airport and no summer festival is an unusual thing, and the honest version says so.
The Woods Cross pages
Seven Local pages on the city itself
Everything The Local has written about Woods Cross: the block that holds the settlement's first graves, the airport nobody counts as this city's, the sales tax that buys the parks, the plan the state made the city draw around its rail platform, the two refineries and the name they share, and what a Woods Cross address changes against the bench town everyone here is named after.
The ranked list
The top 5 things to do
The pioneer block, the airfield, the trail and two more, ranked for a real day out.
Read
One block
Hogan Park
An 1849 burial ground, a moved log cabin and two pioneer markers on a single block.
Read
The field
Skypark Airport
A public use airfield on the west flats, and what it is like to live under the pattern.
Read
A penny in ten dollars
The RAP tax
The tenth of a percent that buys the parks, about half of it paid by people passing through.
Read
The half mile circle
The Station Area Plan
The FrontRunner platform and the half mile the state had the city plan around it.
Read
Two plants, one name
Silver Eagle and the name
The refinery that really is in Woods Cross, and how a rail crossing named the town.
Read
Moving here
Woods Cross or Bountiful
The flat crossroads or the bench town next door, and what the city line actually changes.
Read
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Quick answers
Woods Cross, answered
For a refinery, a rail stop and an airport, in a town most people only pass through. The plant everyone calls the Woods Cross Refinery actually sits next door in West Bountiful; the refinery inside the city is Silver Eagle, a small specialty plant that has run since 1954. The city also holds the only FrontRunner station in south Davis County, and, on its west flats, Skypark, a general aviation airport that flies more than two hundred operations on an average day.
On the valley floor at the south end of Davis County, boxed in by Bountiful to the east, West Bountiful to the north and west, and North Salt Lake to the south. It does not quite reach the Salt Lake County line, because North Salt Lake sits between. The city covers about 3.83 square miles at roughly 4,249 feet, only fifty to sixty feet above the old shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, which is why its far west side is flats and wetland rather than bench.
Not the big one. The refinery known as the Woods Cross Refinery, a 45,000 barrel a day HF Sinclair plant, sits in West Bountiful, even though its mailing address reads Woods Cross. The refinery that is genuinely inside the city is Silver Eagle, a much smaller specialty plant on the west side. The two cities share the 84087 zip code, which is why the mailing addresses and the city limits disagree.
Yes, and it is one of the quieter facts about the city. Skypark Airport sits on the west flats at 1887 South 1800 West, a privately owned field open to public use with one asphalt runway of about 4,634 feet, 256 based aircraft and roughly 234 flight operations on an average day, all of it general aviation. The federal record still describes it as three miles southwest of Bountiful, but it is inside Woods Cross.
From a railroad crossing on one farm. When the Utah Central Railroad came through in 1869, Daniel Wood gave the lower part of his farm for a depot and crossing, and the stop was called Woods Crossing before it was shortened to Woods Cross. The town also tells a story about Wood hearing a conductor call the name and answering that he was indeed cross, which is folklore rather than history but is the tale the town tells about itself.
In the mid 1930s. The town was chartered in 1935, and by 1936 it had set up a water board and a town council. Its police department dates to 1960, when the city named its first town marshal, and by 1968 it had built the City Hall that served as police headquarters. That 1968 building is the one the city is replacing now.
It does, at 750 South 800 West, and it is the only FrontRunner stop in south Davis County. It opened in April 2008 with a single island platform and two free park and ride lots holding about 230 spaces. The service pattern matters more than the platform: FrontRunner runs Monday through Saturday with no Sunday train, roughly every half hour at weekday peak and about once an hour off peak and on Saturdays.
A recreation, arts and parks sales tax of a tenth of one percent, which the city describes as a penny on every ten dollars, and which is not charged on food, gas or pharmacy items. Voters first approved it in 2009, and it can be spent only on parks, recreation and the arts. Utah law makes a city renew it every ten years, and Woods Cross voters renewed it in November 2025.
The city's parks ordinance says no. It bars animals of any species from city parks, with an exception for service animals and for city approved events that feature animals. Confusingly, the city's own parks tax material lists dog parks among the things the tax has paid for, so the two do not fully agree. Until the city settles it, plan on the ordinance and call the city at 801-292-4421 before you take a dog to a Woods Cross park.
Weighing a move to Woods Cross? Start with what the line changes
A day here is a block of pioneer markers, a runway, a rail platform and a look west toward the wetlands. Buying in Woods Cross asks a narrower set of questions than most towns: which of the four strips a street sits on, how close it is to the industrial corridor and which way the wind runs, and whether a west side lot is genuinely inside the city line or across it in West Bountiful. 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.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
Keep going
Continue your Woods Cross research
Eight more doors into Woods Cross, chosen for what this page covers.
Questions about Woods Cross?
Call Scott, send a message, or find out what your Woods Cross home is worth. No pressure, no obligation.
Referral Disclosure: For moves outside Southern Utah, I can connect you with trusted local agents. If you choose to work with one, their brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee from their commission. This costs you nothing extra, and you are never obligated to use my referral.