Clayton, Benjamin F.

CLAYTON

Posted By: Karon Velau (email)
Date: 6/28/2021 at 23:32:42

History of Warren County, Iowa from Its Earliest Settlement to 1908, by Rev. W. C. Martin, Clarke Publishing Co., Chicago, Illinois, 1908, p.782

BENJAMIN F. CLAYTON
Mr. Clayton has been a person of activity from boyhood and it is diffi­cult to crowd into a limited biographical sketch the large experience of a man that has been active for so many years. His is a history running from the bare-footed orphan boy in the day of slavery and before Warren County was dreamed of, on down through the progressive years that have made Iowa a great state and our nation the greatest world factor.
Born and reared under unfavorable environment, his span of life covers the best age under which man has ever lived. His father, William M. Clay­ton, was born in Paris, Kentucky, in 1788, of Virginian extraction. In 1812 he was a soldier on the battlefield of Lundy's Lane as a private in the company of Captain Metcalf, afterward governor of Kentucky. Ninety years later the subject of this sketch stood upon the same ground amazed at the wondrous progress. His third wife was Mary Adair, of German extraction and the mother of our sketch.
Mr. Clayton was born near Carlisle, Kentucky, January 10, 1839, and it is not strange that his life should be active when we consider the blood cours­ing through his veins is a cross of the Virginia cavalier and the sturdy Ger­man and Anglo-Saxon. When a lad, Mr. Clayton was left practically alone in the world as an orphan boy. Thrown upon his own resources, he went to work beside the slave on the farm at meager wages, becoming disgusted with slavery and with slave aristocracy he left his native state for the glad free north, stopping in Decatur County, Indiana, where he commenced the real battle of life among entire strangers.
In 1862 Mr. Clayton was married to Miss Priscilla Martin, who died in 1868, and in 1869 he was again married, his second union being with Miss Nannie M. Hamilton. Mr. and Mrs. Clayton have reared two children, Wil­liam N., who was graduated from Simpson College, Iowa, in 1890 and shortly afterward lost his life through an accident, and Mona V., who was graduated from the same institution and became the wife of Harry B. Stewart, of Chari­ton, Iowa.
Becoming infatuated with the reports from the west, Mr. Clayton went to Pottawattamie County, Iowa, in 1873, and settled upon what is known as the "Sunny Side Farm," near Macedonia. Success marked his efforts in a degree until he became the owner of fourteen hundred acres of the rich soil of western Iowa. He also eventually became identified with the Macedonia State Bank and one of its directors. Turning his attention to real estate, he dealt largely in land in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and elsewhere, becoming so busy that he had to leave the farm.
Mr. Clayton has taken great interest in politics since before he became a voter. For three years he served as the youngest member ever elected to the board of County supervisors of Decatur County, Indiana, and while in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, he was elected a member of the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth general assemblies; twice served as chairman of the committee on agriculture and one term as speaker pro tem of the Iowa House of Representatives. In the twentieth general assembly he had charge of the bill to permanently locate the State Agricultural Society, for which he secured an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars, and so framed the bill as to make it necessary for the city where it was located to give fifty thousand more, which price was paid by Des Moines when it became permanently located. He served three years as chairman of the board of trustees of the Deaf and Dumb Institution at Council Bluffs, and came nearly getting the nomination for governor at the Republican state convention at Cedar Rapids in place of Mr. Wheeler, who was defeated at the polls by Hon. Horace Boies. Mr. Clayton is a Republican in politics. For several years he stumped the state of Iowa, during the first and second McKinley campaigns,—the most remark­able campaigns in the history of the government,—for two months during each campaign. Mr. Clayton was under the direction of the national com­mittee with headquarters at Chicago, during which he canvassed all the northern and western states from Kentucky to Utah. In 1884 the governor of Iowa commissioned him as a delegate to the third annual session of the Farmers' National Congress at Nashville, Tennessee. At that meeting he was made secretary, which office he held for eight consecutive years, when he was elected president for a term of four years and chairman of the execu­tive committee for nine years, never missing a meeting for more than twenty years. During this time he became acquainted with the agricultural depart­ment at Washington, D. C., and with prominent agriculturists in every con­gressional district in the United States. The congress has been the guest, while Mr. Clayton was identified with it, of Chicago, Illinois ; St. Paul, Minne­sota; Indianapolis, Indiana; Boston, Massachusetts; Fort Worth, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Atlanta, Georgia; Macon, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana;; Colorado Springs, Colorado, and other cities.
For ten years Mr. Clayton was a contributor to Appleton's Annual En­cyclopedia, also to the North American Review, the Midland Monthly and other periodicals. He is president of the Commercial State Bank, of Grand Island; the Farmers Bank, of Big Springs, and the Commercial Bank of Chappell, in Nebraska; also president of the Citizens Bank, of Julesburg, Colorado; a director in the Sedgwick Banking Company, at Sedgwick, Col­orado, and a stockholder in all these institutions located along the Union Pacific Railway. Aside from this he is a large owner of other properties in Nebraska, Colorado, California, South Dakota and British Columbia.
In 1891 Mr. Clayton came to Indianola, Warren County, from which place he has handled his business. For four years he was mayor of the city and an active supporter of conservative city improvement; is a warm friend of education and of Simpson College, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of its board of trustees and for the last fifteen years has been chairman of that board. He organized the Indianola Chautauqua Associa­tion; has lectured in most of the western and southern states; has traveled throughout the United States, in Canada and Mexico and has toured most of the nations of continental Europe. At a ripe age Mr. Clayton is still active in business, delighted in his social atmosphere, progressive in public thought; is a Mason, a Methodist and enjoys his friends.