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HISTORY OF DAVIS COUNTY
arrival lessened the d o m i n a n c e of the C h u r c h of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and introduced the first meaningful diversity to the county's religious makeup. Most of that variety existed in the northern communities. Because of the new immigration, Latter-day Saint membership in the county between 1940 and 1950 dropped from 80 percent of the total population to 72 percent. At the same time, membership in other denominations grew from 20 percent to 28 percent. In raw numbers, however, LDS membership increased considerably The number of wards increased during the 1940s from nineteen to twenty-nine, and church officials created a third stake. A halfcentury later, dozens of new LDS meetinghouses were to be seen, each serving two or three wards. A 1999 roster listed 114 wards in the four s o u t h e r n m o s t cities; another 99 wards in the central region reaching from Centerville to Kaysville; 76 wards in Layton; and 64 others in the other six northern communities. These 353 wards were clustered into forty-nine administrative units known as stakes, each of them encompassing six to nine wards. A highlight for south Davis Latter-day Saints was the dedication on 8 January 1994 of a temple on a foothill site overlooking Bountiful. LDS President Howard W. Hunter offered the dedicatory prayer. Twenty-seven other sessions over the next six days allowed thousands of people to attend the sacred event. Tens of thousands more walked through the temple during a public open house. The temple's service district included members from Kaysville south to the county line. Latter-day Saints in n o r t h Davis remained in the Ogden LDS Temple district. As school districts in Utah were setting up public high schools early in the century, the LDS church tested a weekday religious education program to compensate for the loss of spiritual instruction in the church schools. Seven years later, in 1919, an LDS seminary began adjacent to Davis High School. Named in honor of John R. Barnes, who helped the North Davis and South Davis Stakes fund the new yellow-brick building, the seminary offered released-time classes for Latter-day Saint high school students. 8 3 The church's p r o g r a m expanded with the addition of each new high school in the county, and later seminaries were added to serve n i n t h - g r a d e students attending junior high schools.
