Thomas Stanton

1610-1678 · England → Virginia → Boston MA → Hartford CT → Pawcatuck CT

Born 1610, England

Died 1678

Children include Mary

Educated in England for a cadet, he did not like soldiering, took up with the Puritans instead, and sailed in the Bonaventure in 1635. The ship landed him in Virginia. He left almost at once for Boston, and on the way he mixed with the Indians and picked up their language and their customs fast.

By the next year Boston had him. He was sent with Mr. Fenwick and Hugh Peters to Saybrook as interpreter at the conference with the Pequots over the killing of Captain Stone, and he settled at Hartford in 1637 and married Anna, daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Lord. In his first year there the General Court gave him ten pounds for what he had already done for the country, made him a public officer bound to attend the court and the magistrates on all occasions to interpret between them and the Indians, and put him on ten pounds a year.

He did not always agree with Captain Mason and the court about how the Indians should be handled, and said so. They stopped his salary for two years, blamed his long absences, and put Mr. Gilbert in his place. In 1648 they restored him with the pay. After the New England colonies confederated in 1643 he was chosen out of all the interpreters in the country as interpreter-general, to be consulted and relied on in every emergency. He helped Abraham Pierson turn his catechism into the Indian tongue and certified the translation himself.

He found the Pawcatuck valley while interpreting for Governor Winthrop at a meeting with Ninigret in the Narragansett country, and took it for himself. The General Court gave him leave to build a trading-house there in February 1650, and he put it up that spring; his family joined him in 1657. He and his sons ran a large fur trade out of that store, buying from the Indians around them and selling at Boston and in the West Indies. He was magistrate and commissioner from 1662 and reappointed every year until he died, deputy from 1666 to 1675, and one of the first three judges when county courts were set up in New London County in 1666. He died in 1678, aged sixty-eight.

Children

Mary Stanton (b. 1640)

Sources

Hurd, History of New London County, Connecticut (1882); Nathaniel Goodwin, Genealogical Notes, or Contributions to the Family History of Some of the First Settlers of Connecticut and Massachusetts (1856); Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887)

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Cite: Heirology, "Thomas Stanton (1610-1678)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-stanton-1610-1678-a95bec.