How it got here Harrisville
Named for the second man who built here, and shaped by an industry the general accounts leave out
The brick years, and the city that arrived a century after the ground did.
Harrisville is named for Martin Henderson Harris, who built a log home west of Four Mile Creek in 1851, although the first house in the area belonged to Urban Stewart and went up the year before. The settlement irrigated from the creek, was granted a charter to take water from the Ogden River in November 1855, and made brick: the city's own history credits Noah L. Shurtliff with hand forming red brick here and says a brickyard remained operating until 2012. The city itself is younger than the industry. It became a township at 3:27 in the afternoon on 9 April 1962, and a third class city in 1964 with 867 people.
My licence and my daily work sit at the far south end of the state, three hundred miles from this valley, so these pages are researched rather than lived. Everything on them was taken where it is issued: Harrisville City's own history, parks, utilities, events, directory and general plan pages; the city council minutes of 9 June 2020 posted on the Utah Public Notice Website; the Utah Division of Water Rights public water supplier record; the Utah Geospatial Resource Center for municipal boundaries, the Weber County assessor's roll, the national hydrography layer, the state road centerline and the state board of education school layer; the federal elevation point service; the North View Fire District; the transit authority's own schedules; the Census Bureau's American Community Survey and its boundary geometry; and the operators that publish their own addresses. Every figure carries the day it was read. A Weber and Morgan partner agent takes the ground level work.
The short answer
Harrisville is named for Martin Henderson Harris, who built a log home west of Four Mile Creek in 1851, although the first house in the area went up the year before and belonged to Urban Stewart. The settlement irrigated from the creek and was granted a charter to take water from the Ogden River in November 1855. Its industry was brick: the city's own history credits Noah L. Shurtliff with hand forming red brick here, and records that a brickyard remained operating until 2012. Harrisville became an incorporated township at 3:27 in the afternoon on 9 April 1962 and a third class city on 30 January 1964, with a population of 867. Checked at the city on 21 August 2026.
The live question
Who was Harrisville named for, and what did the place actually do for a living?
The city's own history page answers the first half more precisely than any general account does, and the precision is the interesting part. The first house in the area was built of logs by Urban Stewart in 1850. Martin Henderson Harris built a log home west of Four Mile Creek in 1851 and the city carries his name, not Stewart's. The city adds that Harris was a nephew of Martin Harris. So the settlement is named for the man who arrived second, which is the sort of thing that only survives because somebody in the city wrote it down, and this site's practical city guide has the year and the name right without the distinction.
The second half has a much better answer than the one in circulation, and almost nothing prints it. This was a brick town. The city's history credits Noah L. Shurtliff, son of Luman Shurtliff, with hand forming red brick here, and records that a brickyard remained operating until 2012. Read that date again: an industry that started in the nineteenth century in a settlement of a few hundred people was still running inside living memory, and stopped fourteen years ago. Every general description of Harrisville calls it an agricultural community and stops there. The farms were real, and so were about a hundred and sixty years of brick.
The third thing the city writes down is a time. At 3:27 in the afternoon on 9 April 1962, Harrisville became an incorporated township, with Leland Saunders as township president. It became a third class city on 30 January 1964, with a population of 867. Neither of those is the 1959 date that circulates. The minute in the 1962 line is worth pausing on: a city that records the hour and the minute of its own incorporation is a city whose early record was kept by somebody who thought it mattered, and the same page is the reason this companion can date the brickyard and the water grant at all.
What that adds up to is a settlement whose story is water, ditches, farms and brick, in that order, and whose civic form arrived very late. Eight hundred and sixty seven people in 1964; about 6,913 today. The growth all happened after the city existed rather than before it, which is the opposite of most Utah towns of comparable age and is why the street pattern here is suburban rather than a pioneer grid.
The plat map
Two hundred plat names on three square miles, and a whole family of them named for a golf course that is not there.
The Weber County assessor's roll, as the state republishes it and as it stood on 29 October 2025, carries 2,866 separate parcels inside Harrisville under about two hundred distinct plat names. Reading those names in order is the closest thing this city has to a written record of what its ground used to be, and the largest single family of them commemorates something the city itself no longer mentions anywhere.
| The plat name on the county roll | Parcel rows carrying it | What the name records |
|---|---|---|
| Golfcrest Village To, Golfcrest Village 2 and Golfcrest Village | About 260 rows across the three spellings | A golf course. The county's plat names for this ground are the clearest surviving evidence that one operated here, and the city's own website returns nothing at all for a search on the word |
| Golf View Estates, Golf View Estates Ph 2, Golf View Est Sub Ph, Golfview Est and Golf View | About 220 rows across five spellings | The same course, from the other side of it. Five variants of one name on one county roll is also a fair picture of how plat records accumulate over decades |
| Fairway Park in three numbered plats | About 110 rows | The same again, in the vocabulary of the game rather than the name of it. Between the three families, well over five hundred parcel rows in this city carry a golf name |
| Ye Olde Farm, Pheasant Farms, Country Farm, Souhrada Farms, Montgomery Farms and Summer Farms | Six separate plat families | The farms the subdivisions replaced, several of them carrying the family name of whoever sold the ground. This is the agricultural history the general accounts do mention, and the county roll is where it is written down |
| Hunting Creek, Brook Meadow, Misty Meadows, Hidden Meadows, Wildflower Estates and Willowcreek | Six more plat families | The naming vocabulary of the decades in which this city actually grew, which is to say suburban rather than pioneer. None of them records anything that was there before |
| New Towne Square At | About 230 rows, the largest single plat name in the city | The largest platted development inside the limits by parcel count, on the northern grid, and a reminder that the city's growth arrived in a small number of very large pieces |
| Harrisville Retail Sub | Two commercial parcels, one of them 20.48 acres | The retail ground on the diagonal, platted as a project in 2000, carrying the 202,499 square foot building that is still the largest in the city |
Counts read from the Weber County assessor roll as the Utah Geospatial Resource Center republishes it, queried 21 August 2026, on a roll current as of 29 October 2025. Row counts include multiple building records against the same parcel, so they measure how much of the roll carries a name rather than how many houses stand on it. Spelling variants are the county's own.
The golf names are worth dwelling on because of what is missing beside them. A search of Harrisville City's own website for the word golf on 21 August 2026 returns exactly one result, the Parks and Recreation page, which is about the disc golf course at the main park. The city publishes no golf course, no closure, no history and no plan. What it does have, inside its own limits, is the largest single parcel in the city: 55.86 acres addressed 1800 North Highway 89, classed residential on the county roll, carrying one small building put up in 1973, with no plat name against it at all. Its boundary crosses the North Ogden line, which is why the county assigns it to Harrisville while some of its edge sits in the next city.
This companion does not state what was on that ground, what is planned for it, or when anything changed, because no public body reached on 21 August 2026 publishes any of it. What can be said with the county's own record behind it is that more than five hundred parcel rows in this city carry a golf name, that the ground those names surround is a single unplatted parcel with almost nothing built on it, and that the city's Planning Commission, which meets at seven in the evening on the first Wednesday at City Hall, is the body that would know. The page on moving here carries the rest of the land question.
The cabin
A bicentennial purchase in 1976, and fifty years later the city still eats lunch in it.
The strongest single civic asset in Harrisville is not a park and not a building the city built. In 1976, during the national bicentennial year, the city bought the Martin Henderson Harris family property and made it the Martin Henderson Harris Memorial Park, with funding assistance from the Utah Bicentennial Committee and labour contributed by residents. The cabin on that ground carries the name of the man the city is named for, and on the second Tuesday of every month at noon it is where the city holds its senior lunch. A ground bought in a bicentennial year and still doing the same job fifty years later is an unusually unbroken civic thread for a suburb this size.
The city gives the cabin's address as 725 West Harrisville Road on two of its own pages, and as 363 West Independence Blvd, which is City Hall, on its own August 2026 calendar entry. The 725 address has the weight behind it: two city pages and a matching 0.58 acre parcel classed tax exempt local government on the county roll. Both are printed here because both are the city, and neither page flags the other. The page on the city's year carries the lunch and the rest of the calendar.
The cabin is reservable, and only by residents. The city's wording is that it is available to reserve all year long to Harrisville residents, which is the same arrangement it applies to the bowery at the main park between April and September. No reservation fee is published for either. For anybody weighing an address here, a bookable historic building that only residents can book is a small and genuine benefit of living inside the line rather than beside it.
The details
Getting there
The cabin stands on Harrisville Road, which is the US-89 diagonal through the middle of the city, west of City Hall on Independence Boulevard. Both of the addresses the city gives for it are inside the city and both sit on parcels the county classes as tax exempt local government, so a visitor arriving at either will be at a city building rather than lost.
Before you go
- Ring 801-782-4100 before a first visit. The city prints two different addresses for this building on its own pages.
- Reservations are limited to Harrisville residents, all year round.
- The 1976 purchase was of family property rather than a new build, so the ground and the name go together and the city records both.
- No fee of any kind is published for the cabin, the lunch or any other city event.
The incorporation date in circulation for this city is wrong, and the city's own two pages disagree about what class of city it is now. Harrisville did not incorporate in 1959. Its own history page records that at 3:27 in the afternoon on 9 April 1962 it became an incorporated township, with Leland Saunders as township president, and that it became a third class city on 30 January 1964 with a population of 867. The same city's About page describes Harrisville today as a fifth class city. Utah renumbered its municipal classes after 1964, so both statements can be true at different dates, but the city does not say that anywhere and this page does not say it on the city's behalf. Print the 1964 designation as history and the current one as current, and do not merge them.
The brick
An industry that started by hand in the nineteenth century and stopped in 2012, which is inside almost everybody's memory.
Harrisville City names its own major industry in a single sentence and then nobody repeats it. Noah L. Shurtliff, son of Luman Shurtliff, hand formed red brick here, a brickyard became established, and on the city's own account a brickyard remained operating until 2012. That is the industrial history of this place and it is not in general circulation anywhere. This site's own practical city guide describes Harrisville as an agricultural valley floor community whose farming origin is still legible in the older core, and does not mention brick at all.
The city publishes no location for the works, no owner beyond the founding name, no output and no reason for the closure. That is a real gap and it is stated here as one rather than filled in. What can be said is that a brick industry needs clay, water and a road, and that this settlement had a creek, an 1855 diversion right on a bigger river, and a United States highway on a diagonal through the middle of it before the numbered grid was laid. Whether that is why the works were here is a question for somebody with access to the county history, and it is the single most interesting piece of research still outstanding about this city.
The date matters practically as well as historically. A works that ran until 2012 means people living in Harrisville today worked at it or lived beside it, and it means the ground it stood on changed use inside the last fourteen years. In a city of three square miles where the county roll carries about two hundred plat names, that is not an abstract point: the land that industry occupied went somewhere, and the plat record is where it would show up.
The other piece of the same story is what the city was before the brick, which is farms and ditches. The settlers irrigated from Four Mile Creek and then received a charter and grant to take water from the Ogden River in November 1855, and the page on the water takes what that built. Six of the plat families still on the county roll carry a farm name and several carry a family name with it, which is the closest thing this city has to a record of who sold what to whom.
The brick years, in numbers
1850
the first house in the area, built of logs by Urban Stewart on the city's own account
1851
the log home west of Four Mile Creek that gave the city its name
2012
the year the city says a brickyard here stopped operating
867
the population when Harrisville became a third class city on 30 January 1964
What this page does not tell you, and why
Harrisville City's history page tells its 1850 founding through a violent episode. This site does not write about killing in any era, in any wording, at any length, so that passage is not paraphrased here, not gestured at and not summarised. It is a standing rule across every page on this site and it costs this page a paragraph, which is the correct trade.
Bingham's Fort appears in the city's history as a place settlers moved to and later returned from, and it is named here as a place name and nothing more. Its own history is a Weber County subject rather than a Harrisville one. A historical marker connected to the founding episode also exists and is recorded in the city's council minutes of 9 June 2020 as having weathered, with a heritage body offering to help replace it. The marker is real; its subject is not written here.
Living with it
A city that arrived in 1962 on ground that had been farmed for a hundred and twelve years.
The practical use of all this for somebody weighing an address here is that it explains the street pattern, and the street pattern is what a buyer actually lives with. The old road came through on a diagonal. The farms and the ditches were laid out around it. The city arrived in 1962 with 867 people, and everything after that was subdivision, which is why about two hundred plat names sit on three square miles and why the older core and the newer streets read so differently from each other.
It also explains why the county's roll is the best written record of this city. Harrisville publishes a good history page, a nine item events list and very little else, and its own newsletter has not been added to since an issue posted on 31 May 2025. What it has instead is 2,866 parcels each carrying a plat name, a build year and an acreage, and that record is public, searchable and current to 29 October 2025. Anybody serious about a specific street here will learn more from twenty minutes on the county roll than from any amount of general description, this page included.
The one place the history and the present meet head on is the largest parcel in the city, the 55.86 acres at 1800 North Highway 89 with no plat name on it and more than five hundred surrounding parcel rows named for a golf course. What happens there will change this city more than anything else on this companion, and no public body has published a word about it. The page on moving here puts that alongside the building record, which fell from 103 structures in 2018 to 39 in 2022 and came back to 91 in 2024.
A city that records the minute of its own incorporation and the year its brickyard closed is a city that has been paying attention. The trick is that almost nobody reads what it wrote down.
Keep reading
Five more pages on Harrisville, and what each one settles.
The three parks
The parks and the pond
Three parks, three walking tracks, and the only distance this city puts a number to.
Read the guideThe city's year
The Fall Festival and the city's year
One October evening, and the celebration a council cut in a budget meeting in 2020.
Read the guideThe roads
Harrisville Road and the grid
US-89 is Harrisville Road, and the boulevard everybody calls the spine is the border.
Read the guideThe water
The water and the ditches
No river, one creek the federal record calls pipe and ditch, and five bills in one.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Harrisville
Its own police force and its own court, and no water main, library or fire station.
Read the guideThe whole set
Harrisville, in full
A separate city of 6,913 on Ogden's street numbers, with its own court and no water main.
Open the companionQuick answers
The history, answered.
Martin Henderson Harris, who built a log home west of Four Mile Creek in 1851 on Harrisville City's own history page, which adds that he was a nephew of Martin Harris. He was not the first person to build there. The city records that the first house in the area was built of logs by Urban Stewart in 1850, a year earlier. So the settlement carries the name of the man who arrived second, which is a distinction the general accounts leave out. This site's own practical city guide gives the 1850 settlement date and the Harris name and can now be sharpened with both.
In two steps, and neither of them is the 1959 date that circulates. Harrisville City's own history page records that at 3:27 in the afternoon on 9 April 1962 Harrisville became an incorporated township, with Leland Saunders as township president, and that it became a third class city on 30 January 1964 with a population of 867. The same city's About page describes it today as a fifth class city. Utah renumbered its municipal classes after 1964, so both can be true at different dates, but the city does not say so and this page does not say it for them.
Brick, and the city says so plainly while almost nothing else does. Harrisville City's history page credits Noah L. Shurtliff, son of Luman Shurtliff, with hand forming red brick here, records that a brickyard became established, and states that a brickyard remained operating until 2012. That is an industry that began in the nineteenth century and stopped fourteen years ago, inside living memory. The city publishes no location, no owner beyond the founding name, no output and no reason for the closure, and no other public body reached on 21 August 2026 adds any of it.
A city building at 725 West Harrisville Road, on ground the city bought in 1976. Harrisville City's history page records the purchase of the Martin Henderson Harris family property for the Martin Henderson Harris Memorial Park during the national bicentennial year, with funding assistance from the Utah Bicentennial Committee and labour contributed by residents. The cabin is available to reserve all year long and only by Harrisville residents, and it is where the city holds its senior lunch at noon on the second Tuesday of every month. The city gives a second address for it, 363 West Independence Blvd, on its own calendar.
Because the county's plat names record something the city no longer mentions anywhere. On the Weber County assessor's roll, as the state republishes it and as it stood on 29 October 2025, more than five hundred parcel rows inside Harrisville carry a golf name across three families of plats: Golfcrest Village in three spellings, Golf View Estates in five, and Fairway Park in three numbered plats. A search of Harrisville City's own website for the word golf on 21 August 2026 returns one result, and it is about the disc golf course at the main park.
A single unplatted parcel of 55.86 acres addressed 1800 North Highway 89, on the Weber County assessor's roll as the state republishes it. The county classes it residential, records one small building put up in 1973 on it, assigns the city as Harrisville, and carries no plat name against it. Its boundary crosses into North Ogden, which is why the ground reads as Harrisville on the county roll while part of its edge sits in the next city. This companion does not state what was on it or what is planned for it, because no public body publishes either.
The ground was settled in 1850 and the city arrived in 1962, so there are a hundred and twelve years between the two. That gap is the reason the place looks the way it does. Harrisville had 867 people when it became a third class city in 1964 and has about 6,913 today, which means essentially all of its growth happened after it became a municipality rather than before. The result is a suburban street pattern laid around one old diagonal road, rather than the pioneer grid a Utah town of that founding date usually has.
About two hundred distinct plat names across 2,866 parcels, on a county roll current as of 29 October 2025 and queried at the state on 21 August 2026. The single largest plat name by parcel rows is New Towne Square At, and after the golf families the next largest groups carry farm names: Ye Olde Farm, Pheasant Farms, Country Farm, Souhrada Farms, Montgomery Farms and Summer Farms among them, several of which appear to carry the family name of whoever sold the ground. For a city of three square miles that is a very large number of separate decisions.
It appears in the city's own history as a place settlers moved to for protection and later returned from, and this page names it as a place name and nothing more. Its own history belongs to Weber County rather than to Harrisville, and it sits alongside a part of the city's founding narrative that this site does not write about in any era or any wording. What this companion writes instead is the 1851 log home, the farms, the November 1855 charter and grant to take water from the Ogden River, and the brickyard that ran until 2012.
A hundred and twelve years between the first log home and the first city council.
History is not usually the deciding factor in a move and here it explains something practical: why the old core and the newer streets read so differently, why one road runs on a diagonal through an otherwise rectangular city, and why the county's plat map carries about two hundred names on three square miles. If you are weighing a specific street, the useful next step is twenty minutes on the county's parcel record for it, because the build year, the acreage and the plat name will tell you more about what you are buying into than any description will. Tell me which streets are in play and I will introduce you to a Weber and Morgan partner agent who can pull that record and walk the ground, 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.