New Mexico Office of the State Historian : Clayton

Clayton

Stephen W. Dorsey was a former US Senator (1873-79) from Arkansas who, with his lawyer, Bob Ingersoll, started the Triangle Dot Ranch in Colfax and Union Counties. In the late 1880s, Dorsey's range manager, John C. Hill suggested to Dorsey that they form a company, secure land on a proposed railroad right-of-way, and locate a townsite. Dorsey like the idea, and they chose a site near Apache Spring, an important water source. At the time, the only habitiation close to the townsite was T. E. Owen's Pitchfork Ranch, three miles west of Perico Creek; Homer Byler, Owen's storekeeper, had established a post office called Perico there in 1886.

By 1887, the settlement that would become Clayton was primarily a tent town, with a few stores and three saloons; it had neither name nor post office. But early in 1888 Byler moved the Perico post office to Clayton, and on March 23, 1888, three days after the first C&S train arrived on newly laid rails, the post office was renamed Clayton in honor of Senator Dorsey's son, who in turn had been named for Senator Clayton in Arkansas. Young Clayton eventually became a successful attorney in Denver.

Robert Julyan
The Place Names of New Mexico
2nd. ed., University of New Mexico Press, 1998