James L. Clayton, the founder of Clayton Mobile Homes (1966), graduated from UT in engineering in 1957 and from the College of Law in 1964. He was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. While a student, he began to fix and resell cars and started a used-car business in 1956. He grew his mobile home company into the largest US producer of manufactured housing and sold the publicly traded company to Berkshire Hathaway for $1.7 billion in 2003. Clayton published an autobiography, First a Dream, in 2002. It was cowritten with Bill Retherford. Reportedly, the book’s presentation to Warren Buffett by College of Business students resulted in Buffett’s purchase of the company.
Clayton was born in Finger, Tennessee (Chester County), and was the son of a sharecropper. As a child he aspired to become a country music singer.
In 1983 Clayton founded BankFirst, a group of banks in East Tennessee and served as its chairman. After taking BankFirst public in 1998 at $800 million, he sold it to BB&T in 2000. At BB&T (Winston Salem), Mr. Clayton served on the board of directors, chaired the Executive Committee, and acted as chairman of the Tennessee BB&T Board until December 2004. He purchased First State Bank of Henderson, Tennessee, in 2002 and added others, which formed Clayton Bank and Trust.
Clayton was inducted into the Horatio Alger Organization of Distinguished Americans in 1991. He has been listed in the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans—first in 1991. His gift of $1 million to the UT College of Law established the Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law.