On the street where you live

Name or number — what's the designation of the street you live on in Davis County?

More than 1,400 streets in Davis County use proper nouns for designation, instead of numbers.

While there may be an equal number of streets identified by numbers only (and some that use both), Davis' roads with names include a variety of intriguing oddities.

Three Davis County communities — Clinton, Sunset and Syracuse — prefer streets named with numbers and only have two to three streets using nouns as names. That's probably not only because of traditions set decades ago but because emergency responders prefer numbered addresses, since they are generally easier to locate.

The other 12 cities in Davis County use a mixture of numbers and nouns for their names.

Street names can obviously add flavor to a neighborhood, while names by numbers do not.

According to Harris Adams, Layton and Davis County historian, not all of the county's pioneer era street names have survived to the 21st century.

For example, Antelope Drive in Layton — the street Adams resides on — used to be called Straw Street. Adams said that's because it was a clay-based road in its early days and had to have a lot of straw thrown on top of it to make it passable. In later years, Antelope Drive (2000 North in Layton) was known as Syracuse Road. The Antelope designation took hold in the late 1960s, when the state of Utah purchased Antelope Island and the highway was a straight shot to the causeway that was built to travel across the Great Salt Lake.

Hill Field Road, the busiest nonfederal or state road in Davis County and passing by the Layton Hills Mall, used to be known as Easy Street in pioneer times. Why that was the case is not clear.

In the early 1990s, the Layton City Council proposed renaming the Hill Field Road Freedom Boulevard. The Utah Department of Transportation assumed the road would be renamed, and it even switched many signs along the roadway. However, a few days later the actual motion to rename failed by one vote. UDOT then had to switch the signs back, and some longtime Layton leaders found the "Freedom" signs to be collector items.

Fiddlers Creek Lane was the original name for Rosewood Lane in Layton. It was named after some musicians who lived on the street. Later some confusion led to the Rosewood designation. Some subdivision developers have revived the Fiddlers Creek name in recent years.