Layton City BEFORE Hill Air Force Base came along ...

The Hill AFB Air Show in 2009.

By Lynn Arave

Hill Air Force Base is the dominant employer in Layton City and Davis County. However, what was Layton City like before Hill came along in 1940?

Here’s a brief look at that pre-situation:

In 1940, Layton was a small, sleepy farming town with a population of just 646 people. 

“It was kind of a closed group,” Jay Dansie, 86, a lifelong Layton resident recalled in the winter of 2013-2014, of life in Layton before Hill came along. “It was still a settlement of families,” he noted, explaining that there just were not many outsiders.

That all changed, Dansie said, when Verdeland Park, a massive World War II military housing development, opened where Layton High School, the Layton City Offices and Commons Park are today, in 1943. It boasted some 1,500 residents – half the city’s population – in its heyday.

“The whole city changed when Verdeland Park went in,” Dansie said. “It changed the city forever.”

Outsiders and many out-of-state residents moved in.

Indeed, Main Street was widened. The city’s first traffic signal went in during 1943 at Main Street and Gentile as Layton’s population had multiplied. Some of Layton’s “cow trails” became roads and agriculture started being pushed out. Many new businesses came to the city too.

Some of this was unexpected. The Ogden Chamber of Commerce had led the charge to establish Hill Air Force Base and just assumed the main gate to the base would be located on the north, the Ogden side.

“Ogden wanted it all their way,” Dansie said.

However, the main gate – the south gate – faced Layton and spurred a lot of this explosive growth.

By 1950, Layton City’s population was 3,456 people, a 435 percent increase from 1940.

After the war, many newly married couples in Davis County made their homes there. (Verdeland Park closed in 1962.)

Before Hill Air Force Base came along, there was no “Hill Field Road.” That road was “Easy Street.” Also, there was no Highway 193 and the main road to Weber Canyon continued along  today’s 1800 North in Sunset and went straight east to the mouth of Weber Canyon.

Dansie said before Hill AFB came along, that area where it is now was called “the Sandridge” and he recalls it being a great, sandy place to hunt for Indian arrows as he grew up in the late 1930s.

Layton’s growth, with Hill as the catalyst, continued in the next decade, as Layton’s population soared to 9,027 in 1960, an increase of 161 percent over 1950. 

Note: The ground-breaking to establish Hill Air Force Bases was about 74 years ago, on Jan. 12, 1940.

(-Written by Lynn Arave and originally published on the Layton City Web site.)

                The Layton side of Hill Air Force Base.

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

Besides the 'Seagull' miracle, were there at least 3 pioneer 'wind' miracles too?

By Lynn Arave

PERHAPS the most famous miracles in Mormon Pioneer history occurred in June-July of 1848 when the first crops in the Salt Lake Valley were threatened by a plague of insects, what would later be called “Mormon crickets.”

Starting in May, the crickets started eating the wheat, corn, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, squash, melons and other crops – and continued to do so for a month.

After many prayers by the pioneers, a white cloud of seagulls flew in during early June and started devouring the crickets. 

However, this was not a one-day event. The birds came daily for about three weeks, eating insects, drinking water and then regurgitating before eating more of the insects. The remainder of the pioneer crops were saved.

This timely appearance of gulls was described in a letter of June 9 to Brigham Young, who was back East at the time: "The sea gulls have come in large flocks from the lake and sweep the crickets as they go; it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor." 

(However, for some pioneer settlers, it apparently required months of time afterward for this to be heralded as a miracle.)

The Seagull Monument on Salt Lake’s Temple Square commemorates that event.

                      Seagull Monument on Salt Lake's Temple Square.

However, the early Layton-Kaysville area apparently benefited from what may also be a similar miraculous event.

Grasshoppers, rather than the more famous Mormon crickets, caused the majority of the insect damage in pioneer Utah. (Crickets were hardly a nuisance in Utah after 1850.)

During the summer of 1854, grasshoppers threatened to destroy all the crops of settlers in the Layton-Kaysville area. 

This insect horde rose one morning like a low, dark cloud. However, huge wind gusts soon came from the eastern canyons and carried the grasshoppers out over the Great Salt Lake. 

Millions of dead insects later washed up on the shores of the lake and most of the settlers’ crops were spared.

While gusting canyon winds occasionally occur in winter, early spring or late fall, they are very, very unlikely to happen in the summer, according to northern Utah weather records.

In fact, historically, this is the lone recorded canyon wind gusting event in the prime summer months for Davis County. From mid-May to early September, these winds have otherwise never blown.

                         Some marshes around the Great Salt Lake.

The same windy “miracle” also repeated at least twice, though in Salt Lake County.

A year later, in 1855, in the western area of Salt Lake County, swarms of grasshoppers also threatened settlers’ crops. Once again, a providential wind came along and blew the insects into the Great Salt Lake.

The same thing happened again during 1868 in Salt Lake.

 After noticing the quantities of dead insects in the lake in 1868, Benjamin LeBaron wrote, "I consider this later deliverance from the grasshoppers just as great and miraculous as the former 1848 rescue from the ravages of the black crickets."

The years 1854-56, 1867-72, and 1876-79 are believed to have been the worst years of grasshopper infestations in Northern Utah during the pioneer era.

SOURCES: Encyclopedia of Mormonism; “Utah’s Weather and Climate,” by Dan Pope and Clayton Brough; http://historytogo.utah.gov  and “Davis County Land of Peace, Beauty and a Quality of Life,” by the Davis School District, 1994.

(-Written by Lynn Arave and originally posted on the Layton City Web site, on March 27, 2014.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

The Mystery of Layton's Gentile Street

By Lynn Arave
LAYTON, UTAH -- Perhaps no other street name in Davis County's largest city is more unusual than Gentile Street.

Located on the south side of town, this striking moniker spans the west to the east, more than nine miles in length.

Most residents probably rarely give the name a second thought.

Some erroneously pronounce it as "Gen-till."

According to Layton City's history (www.laytoncity,org) and the Utah State History site (history.utah.gov), Layton City's territory was first settled in 1851  by early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The earliest settlers were grouped around the natural streams in the area (Kays Creek and Holmes Creek), as water was scarce, until canals were created.  By 1877, the Davis and Weber Canal was dug and that opened new areas of settlement.
By 1882, Gentile Street was open for travel.
The street's name came from the only two resident families on the east end of the road, who were not members of the LDS Church.
The Gentile Street name likely came from those early non-Mormon settlers, Giles Bowler and Joseph Hudson, who lived along the road on the City's west side and referred to themselves as "Gentiles."


Hence, "Gentile" the street name was born.
To Jews, Gentiles are anyone who is not Jewish.. For LDS (Mormon) Church members, the Gentile name refers to anyone who is not Mormon, according to the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Later, a Protestant Church was once located along Gentile Street, which further solidified that name.
Ironically, in the 21st Century, there are three different LDS Chapels located along Gentile Street -- two on the east side and one on the west. There is also a Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses faith located on the east section of Gentile Street.
Gentile Street also extends westward, beyond Layton. Even though some Syracuse City street signs call it "3700 West Street," there some (like in the second photo below), where even Syracuse uses the Gentile name officially.
Also, of interest is that at least one of the old, historic homes on the East Gentile half sports address numbers that denote when the home was built, like 1877, rather than refer to an exact geographical reference point.
And, the area not far from today's Layton City Hall was originally referred to as "Scotland," because that's where its earliest settlers had came from.
Today's Fort Lane road name came from the "Little Fort Lane" title it had in the 19th Century, when a fort was built in that area to protect residents from the Indians.
--Layton also has a Chapel Street, home to an LDS Chapel, as well as a Catholic Church.


--AND, the idea of naming a place after non-Mormons with the "Gentile" term is NOT unique to Layton. The Gem Valley (Grace, Idaho and surrounding area) was originally named "Gentile Valley," in 1870 -- likely before Layton's Gentile Street was named -- after the non-Mormons who first lived in that S.W. Idaho valley.)