Alonzo Eratus Horton (October 24, 1813 – January 7, 1909) was an American real estate developer in the nineteenth century. The Horton Plaza mall in downtown San Diego is named for him. Early life Horton was born 1813 in Union, Connecticut, the scion of an old New England family, and grew up in Onondaga County, New York. By his 20s he had developed a keen entrepreneurial spirit, and in 1834, when he was 21, he began transporting grain by boat from the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, New York, to Canada. He also taught school there, and in 1834 ran for constable on the Whig ticket. But having developed a cough, and with his family and friends fearing tuberculosis, he was advised to move to the West. At that time, the Western frontier was Wisconsin, and in 1836 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A story was told that when Alonzo was eight years old and still living in New York he sold a pig for $1. By mistake, the man gave him $2. The next day Horton returned the $1. By coincidence, the two met again years later in Wisconsin, and the purchaser remembered the incident. He told a large group of citizens in Wisconsin. "I would trust Horton with everything I have in the world." In 1847, after the American success in the Mexican–American War, Horton traveled to St. Louis, Missouri then the gateway to the Western frontier, and by purchasing land warrants from veterans of that war, gained 1,500 acres (6 km2) of land in the rural wilderness of northern Wisconsin. In 1848 he filed the first warrant for what would become the village of Hortonville, Wisconsin, in Outagamie County near Appleton, Wisconsin. Today, Hortonville is a village with a 2010 population of over 2,700. In 1848 Horton filed his first Warrant in Green Bay, the County seat for Brown County which the area was a part of at that time, for 160 acres of land which is now "Downtown Hortonville". The price per acre at that time was only $.70. But before he could file he had to take an oath that he had seen and inspected the land and that no other settler resided on the land. To do so meant travelling by foot to inspect the land which was almost all dense woods with no trails. Then he had to go back to Green Bay