Rayl (later Hackstaff) is a former town in

Lassen County Lassen County () is a county in the northeastern portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 32,730. The county seat and only incorporated city is Susanville. Lassen County comprises the Susanville, Calif ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. It was located north of

Doyle Doyle is a surname of Irish origin. The name is a back-formation from O'Doyle, which is an Anglicisation of the Irish (), meaning "descendant of ''Dubhghall''". There is another possible etymology: the Anglo-Norman surname ''D'Oyley'' with agglu ...

, roughly at the location of present-day Herlong. It was named after David Rayl, who built a hotel/store at the site in 1915. The location was the junction between the

Western Pacific Railway The Western Pacific Railroad was a Class I railroad in the United States. It was formed in 1903 as an attempt to break the near-monopoly the Southern Pacific Railroad had on rail service into northern California. WP's Feather River Route dir ...

and the ill-fated

narrow gauge A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge narrower than standard . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curves, smaller structu ...

Nevada-California-Oregon Railway (NCO), and Rayl, in addition to constructing the hotel, filed claims for 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. 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 the fall of 1920, Rayl leased his business to one Cyrus Helman, who also became assistant postmaster. This relationship led to strife in 1922 when Rayl found accounting discrepancies with the postal receipts; he also had sold the goods in the store to Helman, but had received only half of the payment due. A lawsuit ensued, whose outcome is unclear: in the end it was dismissed by the court in 1930 because a trial date had never been set. In the meantime, the post office was renamed to Hackstaff in 1922, but it closed the same year. This was also the year when the NCO ended service between Rayl and Wendel and the Western Pacific moved its crews to

. Rayl held on to the property until 1942, when it he sold it for $1,000 for the construction of the Sierra Army Depot.

References

{{authority control Former settlements in Lassen County, California Former populated places in California