1914: When South Hooper, Clinton and South Weber sought to join Weber County

DAVIS County is by far the smallest of Utah's 29 counties. However, there was a failed proposal in 1914 that sought to put South Hooper, Clinton and South Weber into Weber County.
According to the Weekly Reflex newspaper of Kaysville on Jan. 29, 1914, petitions were circulating to make this proposal a reality.
"The principal reason given for the proposal change is the fact that all the residents of the three precincts named regard Ogden as their trading point and they therefore desire to transact all of their business there," the newspaper story stated.
At the time, this land was considered when one of the richest agricultural sections in the area. Also, West Point was not yet a named community, it primarily being called "South Hooper" at the time.

A portion of South Hooper and all of South Weber had actually at one time been located in Weber County, not Davis.
According to Utah historian Glen M. Leonard in the book, "A History of Davis County," an ecclesiastical disagreement resulted in the southeastern boundary of Davis County moving about one mile north of where it originally was established.

The county line moved south to the Weber River at the east end of Davis County. This meant that the Weber town of Uintah (previously called “East Weber”) was created to define what settlement remained on the north side of the Weber River.

The new Davis County town had also already favored the name “South Weber,” even though it was now in a different county, but at least it was indeed on the south side of the Weber River.

Jump ahead to 1877 and a related boundary change was made. 

(Perhaps someone looked at a map of Davis or Weber County and saw the unusual zag in the county line... created in the 1855 change.)

 This time instead of keeping the twist in Davis County’s border beyond South Weber, created by the 1855 change, the county line out west was now moved north about a mile to parallel the change made 22 years earlier in the South Weber section. This now made the Davis-Weber boundary line fairly straight from leaving the Weber River until it reached the marshes of the Great Salt Lake.

(Besides a crooked boundary, one other factor in favor of moving more Weber County land into Davis County -- by moving the Davis line northward on its west side -- was that Davis County was clearly still the state's smallest county of all. Legislators in 1877 may have felt the tiny county could use a little more land.)

The most significant effect this related boundary change created was that Hooper, originally known as “Muskrat Springs” and established in 1852, was now split.

This created “South Hooper” on the Davis County side and it was originally huge, going all the way south to today’s 1700 South (Antelope Drive), before the days of a West Point, Clinton and Syracuse. Over the decades as those three cities were established, “South Hooper” shrunk dramatically and only the section of unincorporated Davis County there is today was left. 

The South Hooper name also faded as the rural area only stretched from West Point at about 5000 West and State Road 37 (“Pig Corner”) about a mile north to the county line.

Yet, today some of these rural residents still consider themselves “Hooperites,” even though they reside in a different county.