In the early morning hours of March 3, 1882, an explosion shattered the quiet of Newhall, jolting the family of local storekeeper and postmaster George Campton awake. Campton’s general store was engulfed in flames after what newspapers of the day described as an act of arson. The blast came from gunpowder stored in the rear of the building, ignited as ...

On January 16, 1877, the Newhall Post Office was officially established at the original town site of Newhall, the modern Saugus Pardee area. The first Newhall postmaster was local merchant George Campton, a key figure in the community’s early growth. Postal records from the U.S. Post Office Department (precursor to the United States Postal Service) confirm that the office was ...

George Campton’s general store in Newhall had the unfortunate distinction of exploding twice—first in 1882 and again in 1891—resulting in four different iterations of the store under his ownership from 1876 to the early 1900s. The original store, Version 1, stood in the original Newhall settlement (near today’s Bouquet Canyon Road and Magic Mountain Parkway).  In early 1878, along with ...