CLAYTON, W.Va. — Few West Virginia place names come with a tale as improbable or as theatrical as that of Clayton, a quiet Summers County community whose name traces back to the crash of a hot-air balloon nearly two centuries ago.
The year was 1835, a time when flight of any kind carried an air of the miraculous. Into this era drifted Richard Clayton, an eccentric Cincinnati metalsmith, watchmaker, and nationally known aeronaut whose daring voyage would end not on the Atlantic coast as planned, but high in a treetop deep in the Allegheny backcountry.
The story has long circulated through Summers County folklore, but local historian William Jones, who pens A Peek into Summers County’s Past, is bringing renewed attention to the episode and to the frontier families whose unexpected hospitality helped secure Clayton’s place in American aviation lore.
“Clayton’s landing isn’t just a quirky anecdote,” Jones said. “It’s a moment when global curiosity, early science, and Appalachian community life collided in the most unlikely way.”
The enthusiast who flew toward the Atlantic but landed in the mountains
Richard Clayton was among the first Americans to take flight seriously, scientifically, and theatrically. Ballooning was the cutting edge of 1830s experimentation, long before steam railroads connected the country's interior or before gliders and fixed-wing aircraft were conceived. Clayton leaned fully into the drama of it.
“He was definitely an entertainer,” Jones explained. “Balloonists of that time were known to be quirky, and Clayton was no exception.”
On April 9, 1835, he launched his enormous balloon, Star of the West, before crowds who had paid 50 cents each — a costly admission when the average weekly wage hovered around $1.25. His goal was ambitious. He would ride the high winds eastward and reach the Atlantic Ocean.
The flight was long, cold, and lonely. Clayton later wrote that the silence and elevation were unlike anything he had known. For nine and a half hours, he drifted over farmland, river valleys, and rugged mountains until the craft, losing buoyancy, descended into the darkness of the Alleghenies.
At 2:30 a.m., Clayton and his balloon collided with a tree on a steep ridge, leaving him suspended 40 feet above the ground.
A dog, a parachute, and a plan for fame
Among the many peculiarities of Clayton’s performance career was his insistence on flying with a companion—a 20-pound dog.
“After he made it to about one mile in altitude, he tossed the dog out of the basket,” Jones said. “But this had all been well planned. The dog parachuted safely back to where the balloon had taken off.”
Clayton reveled in spectacle. The dog stunt, his specially printed flyers announcing “A Grand Aerial Voyage,” and the towering 50-foot balloon all fed a public hungry for science, novelty, and entertainment.
But there was no audience on that mountainside when he crashed, and no nearby settlement to greet him.
Stranded until dawn in unbroken wilderness
Suspended in the tree, Clayton decided it was too dangerous to climb down in the dark.
“In his personal journal, he called the basket ‘his car,’” Jones said. “He secured it with a rope and waited until morning.”
With daylight came another revelation: he was completely alone in a land he described as having “no trace of human footsteps, no mark of change produced by man.”
He climbed down and began searching the wooded ridges for help. It was hours until he encountered a local resident who led him to the home of Joseph Graham, a frontier farmer living several rugged miles away.
Local hospitality and a three-day search for the balloon
The Grahams took Clayton in, giving him food and shelter as word spread through the community of the strange visitor who had fallen from the sky.
“I like to think the locals were at first skeptical,” Jones said. “You can imagine someone knocking on your door in the middle of the night, telling you his ‘car’ had gotten stuck in a tree while he was trying to reach the ocean.”
Graham and his neighbors spent the next three days helping Clayton search for his balloon. During that time, dozens of curious residents traveled to the home to meet the aeronaut and hear his tale firsthand.
When the balloon was finally found, Clayton and the townspeople dismantled it and hauled the pieces to the Ohio River, where he boarded a steamboat back to Cincinnati.
“When he returned home and told the story, he was treated like a hero,” Jones said.
A community born from a sky-borne mishap
Nearly half a century later, Clayton’s improbable landing became immortalized in local architecture and federal records.
A post office was established in the Joseph Graham home on Nov. 3, 1879, during President Hayes’s administration. Its first postmaster, David Graham Ballengee, served an extraordinary 59 years, becoming the 10th-longest-serving postmaster in U.S. history.
The post office, renamed "Clayton" in honor of the aeronaut, operated until 1959, when Ballengee’s son Homer closed it for the last time.
“The name Clayton came directly from the happenings of Richard Clayton 44 years earlier,” Jones said. “It’s one of the most unusual naming stories you’ll find in West Virginia.”
The original Graham home, briefly used as the post office, still appears in early photographs alongside pieces of flatware and other artifacts from the era.
For Jones and other Summers County historians, Clayton’s story is more than a colorful anecdote. It’s a reminder of how global currents of invention and imagination can intersect unexpectedly with Appalachian mountain life.
“It’s rare that you find such a perfect blend of early American science, showmanship, and local history,” Jones said. “People today think of ballooning as quaint or old-fashioned, but in the 1830s it was almost unimaginable—closer to the moon landings of the 20th century.”
Clayton today is a five-mile drive west of the Greenbrier River at Alderson, West Virginia. For more information on visiting Clayton and the lower Greenbrier Valley, visit Explore Summers County.
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