Chances are, you have probably never heard of Ephraim Clayton. For many in Southern Appalachia, he is an important 19th century carpenter and builder. Clayton was born in present-day Transylvania County, North Carolina, in 1804. His father, Lambert Clayton, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. His mother was Sarah Davidson, and her parents had been killed by the Cherokee in 1776. We really don’t know much about Ephraim Clayton’s childhood, but by the 1830s, he was receiving commissions to construct buildings. These buildings included Asheville Baptist Church (1859); Asheville Presbyterian Church (ca.1847); Buncombe County Courthouse (1848); Caldwell County Courthouse (1843); Calvary Episcopal Church, Fletcher, NC (1859); John W. McElroy House, Burnsville, NC (ca.1845); Mars Hill College (1856-1857); Newton Academy, Asheville, NC (1857-1858); Polk County Courthouse (ca.1853); Ravenscroft School, Asheville, NC (ca.1840s); St. John-in-the-Wilderness Episcopal Church, Flat Rock, NC (1833-1834); Trinity Episcopal Church, Asheville, NC (1850); Tuttle’s Hotel, Lenoir, NC (ca.1843); War Ford Bridge, Asheville, NC (1856); and the Yancey County Courthouse (1840s), along with other buildings in Georgia and South Carolina.
While Clayton often
lived in the communities where he was constructing buildings, he considered
Asheville his home. His obituary claimed that he was the first man to bring a steam-powered
planing machine to western North Carolina. In 1850, he employed twenty-five men
and owned seven slaves. By 1860, he owned eleven slaves, plus employing several
free workmen. He also operated a saw and planing mill and a sash and blind
factory.[1]
Asheville was quite possibly the most pro-Confederate town in North Carolina in the 1860s (we’ll save that for a future post). Hundreds of Confederate soldiers had poured forth out of Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County. Governor Zebulon Baird Vance and his brother, Brigadier General Robert B. Vance, came from the area, as did Brigadier General Thomas L. Clingman. Asheville also served as the headquarters of the District of Western North Carolina. As early as July 1861, William L. Henry was writing Gov. Henry T. Clark with a proposal for establishing a plant to manufacture rifles for the Confederacy in Asheville. In August 1861, that idea began to come to fruition. That month, Col. Robert W. Pulliam, the Confederate Ordnance Bureau agent in Western North Carolina, began working with Ephraim Clayton and Dr. George Whitson. In January 1862 the company began producing rifles, and by November 1862, they employed 107 men. Due to the lack of a railroad, materials were sourced locally. That November, they had 200 rifles ready for shipment. Josiah Gorgas, chief of ordnance for the Confederate army, sent W.S. Downer to Asheville to inspect the rifles and the plant. Downer wrote back that while Whitson was a man of “general genius,” he had no “practical knowledge of mechanics.” The tools and machines being used were “makeshift,” and the rifles themselves “worthless.”
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| Asheville News, April 12, 1862. |
The Asheville
Arsenal faced numerous challenges, from a lack of skilled workers to the threat
of attack by Union forces or “disloyal persons.” It was a combination of these that eventually drove
the Confederate arsenal from Asheville. In January 1863, a locally-led raid
occurred at Mars Hill, in Madison County, just north of Asheville. In September,
Knoxville was captured by Federal forces. In October came a raid by Union force
on Warm Springs in Madison County. In late October, the local commander ordered
the machinery to be prepared for moving, which began in late November. The
machinery was transported to Columbia, South Carolina. In the end, the factory
produced some 900 rifles.[2] Capt. Benjamin Sloan
was assigned to command the armory, and Sloan sought to bring in new machinery
and tools. He also constructed two new brick buildings to house the machines
and tools. Ephraim Clayton was appointed as general manager, in charge of “all
Carpenters work and control of teams and teamsters, wood choppers, Coal Burners
and saw mill hands.” Undoubtedly, Clayton’s already-established factory, and the
fact that the new arsenal buildings were on his land, played a role in his
involvement. There were 123 workers by January 1863, although Sloan fired
twenty of them that same month. The men working at the Arsenal were well paid
and were exempt from conscription.
It is unclear if Ephraim Clayton moved to Columbia or stayed in Asheville. His obituary states that his planing mill was destroyed by fire. This could have happened at the end of the war when Federal forces burned the two brick buildings constructed to house the Asheville Armory.[3] After the war, he operated an iron foundry in Asheville 1867 to 1878, while living in Transylvania County, helping to build the Spartanburg and Asheville Railroad and the Western North Carolina Railroad.[4] Clayton died on August 14, 1892, esteemed as “one of the best known citizens of Western North Carolina.”[5] Clayton was “a man of the strictest integrity, plain and unassuming, and universally respected by all for his admirable traits of character. He took a deep interest in Asheville’s progress, and was always foremost in any project that tended to the advancement of the city-a true public-spirited citizen.”[6] He is buried in the Clayton Family Cemetery, Buncombe County, North Carolina.
