About
1732, Quaker Henry Stanton sailed to Beaufort from Newport, Rhode
Island and established a shipyard in the new Quaker Colony, on Core
Creek.
Son, Benjamin Stanton, born in 1746, was first to record information in the family Bible, printed in England in 1712. Benjamin had inherited slaves from his father, but these he had emancipated about the year 1787 when members of the Society of Friends in North Carolina. Benjamin Stanton, and his widow and children, succeeded in protecting the slaves set free by him and some of them emigrated to Ohio with the family in 1800.
One
of the slave women set free by Benjamin Stanton once saved the life of
his son Benjamin, then a very small child. A boat had been pulled upon
the beach and into it the child had clambered. At high tide the boat
started out to sea, but fortunately not so far but that the colored
woman, who discovered the child's danger, was able, by wading almost her
full depth into the water, to catch the boat and pull it ashore. Some
of the colored people set free by Benjamin Stanton took the family name
and their descendants still bear the name Stanton. (From Our Ancestors the Stantons, by William H. Stanton, 1922)
