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The Ashton Family

The Ashton Family

By Briarmont Township Archives

The Ashton family is one of Briarmont's founding families — the line of managers and stewards that made the town's timber enterprise function at scale. If Elias Hartwell represented appetite, the Ashtons represented machinery: the family name endured in Briarmont as one associated with management, discipline, and respectability, but also with the cost of making Hartwell's enterprise work. Their story runs from a Providence merchant household to the Ashton Residence that now anchors Oakridge College.

Family Tree

A Brief History

The Ashtons came west from Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1840s, two branches of one line: Samuel Ashton with his wife Rebecca Hale Ashton — where the Hale and Ashton lines meet — and the household of his brother Caleb. It was Samuel's son Clarence Ashton who fixed the family's place in the town: rising through the Hartwell Timber Co. to Head of Operations, building the Ashton Residence in 1861, and ending his life as sole executor of Elias Hartwell's estate. "The Ashton name carries a standard, not a sentiment," he is remembered saying. "Some branches are not meant to be seen."

The standard proved costly. Clarence's will passed the Residence and the family holdings over both his younger brother Edmund and his only son Benedict to his sixteen-year-old grand-nephew Ward — "Let the house pass not merely as property, but as the charge of a family name." Ward carried that charge as far as it would go: he gave the Residence to Oakridge College in 1948, and the senior branch left Briarmont the following year for Oregon. But the senior line was never the whole family. Caleb's branch — the unpropertied cousins the Residence had been built to leave out — stayed in Briarmont all along, quieter and without holdings, and it is through them that the Ashton name still lives in the town today, down to Clarence Ashton II.

Family Timeline

  1. 1840s

    The Ashtons come west

    The family leaves Providence, Rhode Island, for Northern California — Samuel and Rebecca with the teenage Clarence among them. The progenitors of the line, Erwin and Abigail, never left Providence.

  2. 1861

    The Ashton Residence completed

    Commissioned by Clarence in the late 1850s, the Residence is built to house his aging parents and his brother Edmund's future household. The original plans made no space for the family of Clarence's uncle — an omission that has remained one of the quieter points of interest in the house's story.

  3. 1878

    Head of Operations

    Clarence Ashton becomes Head of Operations of the Hartwell Timber Co., the post he holds until the company dies with its founder. If Elias Hartwell represented appetite, Clarence represented machinery.

  4. 1907

    Benedict marries Clara Siswaqi'

    Benedict Ellery Ashton, Clarence's only son, marries Clara Siswaqi', a Wiyot woman, and leaves the Ashton household. The marriage deepens the break between father and son.

  5. 1911

    Executor of the Hartwell estate

    Elias Hartwell dies without heirs and Clarence becomes sole executor of his estate — the last great charge of his working life, and one he does not live to complete.

  6. 1916

    The will chooses Ward

    Clarence dies at eighty-seven. His will passes the Residence and the family holdings — in trust, past both his brother Edmund and his son Benedict — to his sixteen-year-old grand-nephew Ward. Benedict's later challenge to the will fails.

  7. 1918

    Henry Ashton dies

    Henry Ashton dies on April 18, 1918. His Hale-born wife Eliza Mae outlives him by eight years, to 1926.

  8. 1920

    Ward co-founds Alpha Chi Epsilon

    After the Season of Storms — in which Ward helped pull Holt Briggs from under a fallen tree on the Bluff Path — Alpha Chi Epsilon is chartered at the Oakridge Institute with Ward among its three co-founders.

  9. 1948

    The Residence passes to Oakridge College

    Ward, Clarence's chosen heir, gives the Ashton Residence to Oakridge College — preserved out of obligation rather than affection, and now preserved for good. It is declared a historical landmark in 1976.

  10. 1949

    The senior branch leaves Briarmont

    Benedict dies in April, shortly after learning of the donation; his widow Clara and their two daughters, Priscilla Mae and Wigi Ellery Ashton, leave Briarmont as well. By local hearsay they went south to the Table Bluff Rancheria — the "Old Reservation" — to return to Clara's Wiyot roots, but neither Briarmont nor Hartwell County kept any record of them afterward, and whether they ever arrived is only rumor. Ward and his family leave Briarmont for Oregon the same year — the end of Clarence's senior line in the town. Caleb's branch, however, never left: Raymond and the generations after him carry the Ashton name in Briarmont to the present day.

Legacy

Family records

Shaun Ashton

Shaun Ashton

Shaun was the eldest of the three children born to Ward and Eleanor Ashton in Briarmont, arriving in 1928 into the last generation of the family to grow up in the town. He was…
Eleanor Ashton

Eleanor Ashton

Eleanor came to the Ashtons from Providence, Rhode Island — the same New England city the family had left for California two generations before — and married Ward Ashton, the young man Clarence Ashton's…
Caroline Ruth Ashton

Caroline Ruth Ashton

Caroline Ruth Ashton, born Caroline Ruth Bell in 1946, married Martin Avery Ashton and became the mother of the family's present generation. She and Martin had three children: Simone, who married into the Mitchell…
Raymond Ashton

Raymond Ashton

Raymond belonged to the second Ashton line — the branch descended from Caleb Ashton rather than from his brother Samuel — and was the son of Arther and Dorothea Ashton. Born in 1910, he…
Clara Siswaqi' Ashton

Clara Siswaqi' Ashton

Clara Siswaqi' Ashton was a Wiyot woman who married Benedict Ellery Ashton in 1907; Siswaqi' was her own name, and Ashton she took from her husband. The Wiyot had known the creeks, bluffs, and…
Joseph Ashton

Joseph Ashton

Joseph Ashton, born in 1975, is the youngest child of Martin Avery Ashton and Caroline Ruth Ashton, and the younger brother of Briarmont's mayor, Clarence Ashton II. Beyond his place in the family, little…
Simone Mitchell

Simone Mitchell

Simone Mitchell, born Simone Ashton in 1969, is the eldest child of Martin Avery Ashton and Caroline Ruth Ashton, and the elder sister of Briarmont's mayor, Clarence Ashton II. She took the Mitchell name…
Eliza Harrow Ashton

Eliza Harrow Ashton

Eliza Harrow Ashton was a quiet and gentle woman whose life unfolded largely outside the public record of the Ashton family. Born in 1858, she entered a household dominated by powerful men, old obligations,…
Margaret Ellery Ashton

Margaret Ellery Ashton

Margaret Ellery came into the Ashton family by marriage, as the wife of Clarence Ashton — a match made later in his life, to a woman of a younger generation. Where Briarmont knew Clarence…
Benedict Ellery Ashton

Benedict Ellery Ashton

Benedict Ellery Ashton was the only son of Clarence Ashton, though later Ashton family histories often reduced him to a quiet omission. Gentle, introverted, and drawn more to writing and the natural world than…
Evelyn Grace Ashton

Evelyn Grace Ashton

Evelyn Grace Ashton, born Evelyn Grace Thorne in 1915, married into the Ashton family through Raymond Samuel Ashton, of the branch descended from Caleb Ashton. Little of her own early life survives in the…
Martin Avery Ashton

Martin Avery Ashton

Martin Avery Ashton, born in 1943, was the only recorded son of Raymond Samuel Ashton and Evelyn Grace Ashton, and the figure through whom the Caleb branch of the Ashton family passed from Briarmont's…
Caleb Ashton

Caleb Ashton

Caleb Josiah Ashton, born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1809, was the younger son of Erwin and Abigail and the head of the second Ashton branch — the line that came west alongside his…
Henry Ashton

Henry Ashton

Henry Justus Ashton was the son of Caleb and Martha and the second-generation head of the Caleb branch — a man whose life spanned nearly the whole of the Hartwell timber era in Briarmont.…
Samuel Ashton

Samuel Ashton

Samuel Ashton was the elder son of Erwin and Abigail, and the man who led the Ashton family west from Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1840s — bringing the name to Northern California in…
Edmund Ashton

Edmund Ashton

Edmund Ashton (1850–1928) was a son of Samuel Ashton and the younger brother of Clarence Ashton, the Ashton who ran the Hartwell Timber Co. He married Eliza Harrow Ashton and was the father of…
Rebecca Hale Ashton

Rebecca Hale Ashton

Rebecca Hale Ashton is the point where the Hale and Ashton lines first meet — a daughter of the founding Hale family, of Jonas and Charlotte Hale, who married Samuel Ashton and came west…
Dorothea Ashton

Dorothea Ashton

Dorothea Lilie Ashton, née Hale, was the wife of Arther Ashton and the mother of Raymond, through whom the Caleb branch of the Ashton family carried into the modern day. She was Hale-born —…
Martha Ashton

Martha Ashton

Martha Ellen Ashton, née Rusk, was the wife of Caleb Ashton and matriarch of the second Ashton branch through the years the family was putting down roots in the timber town of Briarmont. Little…
Clarence Ashton

Clarence Ashton

Clarence Ashton was one of the original eight men of the Hartwell Timber Company and served as its early head of operations. While Elias Hartwell supplied the ambition and capital behind the company’s rise,…
Abigail Ashton

Abigail Ashton

Abigail Maye Ashton, née Kamp, was the matriarch of the Ashton family's Providence household and, with her husband Erwin, one of the two progenitors from whom the whole Briarmont line descends. Born in Newport,…
Margaret Eleanor Ashton

Margaret Eleanor Ashton

Margaret Eleanor Ashton — Meg to her family — was the middle of Ward and Eleanor Ashton's three children, born in Briarmont in 1931 between her elder brother Shaun and her younger brother Johnathan.…
Arther Ashton

Arther Ashton

Arther Matthias Ashton was the son of Henry and Eliza Mae Ashton and the third-generation head of the Caleb branch — the working line of the family that grew up in the shadow of…
Erwin Ashton

Erwin Ashton

Erwin Joel Ashton is remembered as the progenitor of the Ashton line — the head of a Providence, Rhode Island merchant household whose sons would carry the name west a decade after his death.…
Eliza Mae Ashton

Eliza Mae Ashton

Eliza Mae Ashton, née Hale, was a daughter of the founding Hale family — of Alan and Gertrude Hale — who married Henry Ashton and joined the Caleb branch of the Ashton line. Her…
Johnathan Ashton

Johnathan Ashton

Johnathan was the youngest of Ward and Eleanor Ashton's three children, born in Briarmont in 1936, thirteen years before the family left the town. He was still a child when his father gave the…