Rayl, California
human settlement in United States of America
Rayl (later Hackstaff) is a former town in Lassen County, California, United States. It was located 9 miles (14 km) north of Doyle, 4200 feet east-southeast of present-day Herlong. The town was named after Stanley Rayl, who built a hotel/store at the site in 1915.
The location was the junction between the Western Pacific Railway and the ill-fated narrow gauge Nevada-California-Oregon Railway (NCO). In addition to constructing the hotel, Rayl filed claims for 40 acres (16 ha) and persuaded the postal service to name the post office after himself rather than, as preferred by the railroad, Hackstaff (the family name of a relative of the company president). In 1917, Rayl tried to persuade the senators from California to establish a training base at the site, and while the proposal was supported by the surrounding states, it was not accepted. In 1918, he petitioned Lassen County to build a road about five miles in length through Rayl, but the road was never built. At about the same time, the NCO sold the right-of-way south of the junction to the Western Pacific, which took up the track and relaid it to standard gauge. In 1919, he proved up his claim on a homestead under the 1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act.
By 1920, Rayl had closed his hotel.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rayl, California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.