Alonzo Horton - Early Life

Early Life

Horton was born 1813 in Union, Connecticut, the scion of an old New England family, and grew up in Onondaga County, New York. By his 20s he had developed a keen entrepreneurial spirit, and in 1834, when he was 21, he began transporting grain by boat from the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, New York, to Canada. He also taught school there, and in 1834 ran for constable on the Whig ticket. But having developed a cough, and with his family and friends fearing tuberculosis, he was advised to move to the West. At that time, the Western frontier was Wisconsin, and in 1836 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There he became a success at trading land and cattle.

In 1847, after the American success in the Mexican-American War, Horton traveled to St. Louis, Missouri then the gateway to the Western frontier, and purchased 1,500 acres (6 km²) of land in the rural wilderness of northern Wisconsin. In 1848 he filed the first warrant for what would become the village of Hortonville, Wisconsin, in Outagamie County near Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the time, the small settlement was quite far from the rest of the world. Today, although it is rather in the shadow of the larger cities of Green Bay and Appleton, Hortonville still exists as a village, with a 2009 population of over 2,700.

In 1851, with his town a success, Horton decided to join many in seeking his fortune in the gold fields of California. He sold his interests for $7,000, and traveled to El Dorado County, California, the heart of the Mother Lode. However, he became a success yet again not so much through gold, but through trading ice in the mining towns. In 1857, he returned to Wisconsin via Panama. During an Indian attack, he lost a bag of gold dust worth $10,000, but kept the money he had made trading ice.

During the late 1850s and early 1860s, Horton spent some time in the East, even marrying his second wife, a prominent New Jersey woman. Horton's first wife, whom he met in Wisconsin, had died of consumption. Horton is known to have married at least thrice, but relatives claimed he married about five times.

In 1862 Horton returned to California, this time to San Francisco, where he opened a furniture and household goods store at 6th and Market streets. While there he heard about growing settlement and interest in a small town called San Diego, located in far southern California, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It had become heavily acclaimed for its dry, warm, healthy climate, very welcome to many cold-weary Easterners. After a lecture about the ports of California, he later recalled his excitement, "I could not sleep at night for thinking about San Diego, and at 2 in the morning, I got up and looked on a map to see where San Diego was, and then went back to bed satisfied. In the morning, I said to my wife, I am going to sell my goods and go to San Diego and build a city." Upon visiting there, he noticed that while the small town was built around the old Spanish presidio (fortress) well inland near the mouth of the San Diego River, no large settlements had been made along the large San Diego Bay just a few miles south, even though all ships sailing to the town docked in the bay.