Sutton is a city of about 1,450 people in Clay County. Luther French made the first permanent settlement in 1870, living with seven children in a dugout near School Creek. The homestead was laid out as a townsite in 1871 and named for Sutton, Massachusetts. The Burlington and Missouri River Railroad first put its depot four and a half miles away, but by 1873 it had moved the stop into town, which settled the question of where the trade would go.
Two hard tests came early. The grasshopper plague of 1874 stripped the fields, and Sutton became a distribution point for federal, state and private relief that carried families through the following winter. Then came the immigrants. Eight Volga German families from the colony of Balzer, who had first tried Red Oak, Iowa, moved to Sutton in 1875, and a much larger group from Norka arrived by train in June 1878. They founded the Emmanuel Reformed Church, and their surnames still fill the local cemeteries.
The Isaac Newton Clark House, an 1877 Gothic Revival home built for a Union veteran and businessman who helped establish the town, went on the National Register in 1983. The Sutton Museum, home of the Sutton Historical Society, covers a main building, a restored 1908 house and a country school. The city describes itself today as a farming and industrial town. Jacob Volz, a Medal of Honor recipient, and Walter Wellman, a newspaperman and arctic explorer, are counted among its notable residents.
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Sutton is Clay County's largest city, founded in 1871 along the Burlington Railroad and named for Sutton, Massachusetts.
The town is the birthplace of Medal of Honor recipient Jacob Volz, and arctic explorer Walter Wellman spent his teenage years in Sutton and launched his newspaper career there before his famous polar expeditions.