“Some months after their marriage Benjamin and Martha Stanton moved into a frame house near the corner of Main and Chestnut Streets, Salem, Ohio, and there all their children were born. They lived there until 1854, when they moved to a brick house he had just built at the corner of Green and Chestnut Streets, where he died Second month Twenty-seventh, 1861, in his sixty-eighth year.
“He was a skilled physician; a student not only in his profession but also in other branches of learning. He was a member of the Society of Friends (Hicksite). Hew was public-spirited and highly-esteemed citizen, prominent in all good works. He was quiet and reserved, retiring and domestic in his habits, but hospitable and fond of his family and friends.
“He was one of the earliest Abolitionists at a time when Abolitionists were but a handful of people, hated and despised, and when to be an Abolitionist required a degree of moral as well as physical courage. His home was a place of rest and refuge for many a fugitive slave on the way to Canada. He died just at the beginning of the struggle which was to result in the overthrow of slavery—a struggle he had often predicted. He often said he had no hope that the slavery question would ever be settled in America, except through war between the North and South; he did not expect to live to see it, but sooner or later it must come.
“Of his father’s family, some were tall and slender and others short and stout. They were familiarly spoken of as ‘the long Stantons’ and ‘the short Stantons.’ His sisters Avis and Lydia and his brother Henry were of ‘the long Stantons,’ as was Benjamin himself, his height being six feet and two inches, as also was that of his son Joseph. Three other sons were five feet eleven and one-half inches to six feet in height."
OUR ANCESTORS THE STANTONS
By William Henry Stanton
