24
HISTORY OF DAVIS COUNTY
In the county's other towns, the transition was more straightforward, but it also took several years for old terms to fade and new ones to prevail. The people in the Deuel Creek area had adopted the name Cherry Creek Settlement as an early name for their community, which included residents along Deuel, Parrish, and Barnard Creeks. Cherry Creek Settlement persisted as a name for the place to at least 1855 even though an LDS ward organized in the spring of 1852 took the name Centreville. 17 The townsite surveyed in 1853 also was named Centreville. It was a decade before the ward name prevailed (with a later modification in spelling) to identify both the congregation and the community 1 8 Farther north, because the name of North Cottonwood Creek identified both the settlement and the ward, it easily prevailed over the post office designation, Miller's Creek. But after the territorial legislature picked North Cottonwood as the county seat in 1852 and called it Farmington, that became the precinct n a m e . After a few years, the settlement and ward names followed suit. In contrast, the residents of Kays Ward experienced only one change, a gradual secularizing of the name to Kaysville.19 Walled Cities. Even though the creation of Latter-day Saint wards and secular precincts established geographical boundaries for the religious congregations and their corresponding secular communities, these administrative units did not require the establishment of cities or towns. The first settlers remained in a scattered rural settlement pattern—living in small log or adobe homes on farms convenient to the canyon streams. This random pattern did not please the master planners of Utah's settlement, however.20 Latter-day Saints had always held as their ideal a cooperative urban life. As first described in 1831, the ideal City of Zion included homesites on lots large enough for a garden and outbuildings, with farms located beyond the city limits. Ideally, the farmers would live in the city along with tradesmen and commute to their farms as needed. Salt Lake City set the pattern for other Utah towns in August 1847 when surveyors laid out a plat patterned after the four-square City of Zion. In Davis County, however, surveys of farmland in 1849 did not address the question of city plats. The first townsites resulted
