Always the entrepreneur, town founder had many activities outside Clayton
This is the second part of series on Clayton founder Joel Clayton. For part one, click here.
Joel Clayton arrived in the California Gold Country in 1850, having led a wagon train from the Midwest. He brought a herd of cattle with him on the advice of his brother, Charles, who noticed the scarcity of beef and dairy products as the state became overrun with gold seekers. Never one to waste any time establishing new business ventures, Joel drove his cattle to Stockton and opened a butcher shop and also operated a dairy in Cow Hollow near San Francisco.
He also continued to pursue his interest in mining, exploring the Pacific coastal ranges for mineral deposits and becoming interested in the geology around Mount Diablo. In 1853, he purchased 40 acres in the Diablo Valley and built a small cottage as a home base.
His wife Margaret continued to live in Wisconsin with the couple’s three children, while Joel spent the next couple of years in the Washington Territory looking for coal deposits and helping to work the Bellingham Coal Co. claim. He set up a trading post on Puget Sound, and the site on Highway 11 is still called Clayton Beach.
The move from Wisconsin
While in Washington, he received a letter from his wife notifying him that she had left Wisconsin with the children. She was sailing to Panama and would be arriving in San Diego. He hurried down the coast to collect his family and settled in Mud Springs near Fort Tejon, where he ran a stagecoach stop on the Butterfield Stage route. Three infant children died in quick succession, and the Claytons moved to Stockton and then to the Willamette Valley.
Joel sold a portion of his 40 acres in the Diablo Valley to be developed as a township with a school, town hall, hotel, general store, livery stables and taverns. At an earlier time, the area was known as Deadfall. Joel had wanted to name the new town Garibaldi for the Italian patriot. But after the town map was drawn up in 1857, a coin toss between Joel and Charles Rhine determined the official town name would be Clayton.
In 1860, Joel worked with George Hearst (father of William Randolph Hearst), head of the largest private mining firm in the United States. When Joel’s eldest daughter, Eliza Clayton, married in 1864, Hearst’s young wife Phoebe was the matron of honor.
Settling in Clayton
The Clayton family moved from Washington to Joel’s small cottage, where they lived until a two-story house was built on the banks of Diablo Creek. In 1861, he purchased an additional 1,200 acres and installed a dairy and a sizable vineyard.
Coal deposits were discovered in 1857 on the land of William Israel northeast of Clayton; the claim was later known as the Black Diamond Mines. The “soft coal” was sent by barge to San Francisco, Sacramento and Stockton to be used in homes and industries, and soon the mines became the largest coal mining operation in the state.
The town of Clayton and the area around it buzzed with activity as people arrived to work the mines and to set up businesses, like Joel’s general store in Nortonville, to support the growing population.
Not able to stay in one place for long, the Census of 1870 records Joel in Santa Barbara with his two sons. He added 320 acres to his Clayton ranch in 1872, but he died that same year of pneumonia at the age of 60.
A March 1872 newspaper article remembered him as “a man of moderate education but of much intelligence, extensive observation and much self-reliance. (He was) extensively known and universally respected.”
Debbie Eistetter is a board member of the Clayton Historical Society. For more information or to become a member, visit claytonhistory.org. The Clayton Museum is open 2-4 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays at 6101 Main St.. Admission is free.