The Story of the Big Granite Boulder that Marks the Home Site of Thomas Stanton, by John 'Whit' Davis
There was a lumber dealer in town named Horace Hall, who was on his way up the Hudson River with his schooner to get a load of lumber. Along the banks of the Hudson he saw a mansion house. He stopped and went ashore, and sure enough the people gave him a set of plans. When he came back home to Pawcatuck, he had the house built. The mansion is still there right there beside the river on the cove. It is about a half-mile upstream from the Thomas Stanton Marker.
Horace had a daughter, Marry Hall, for whom the road is named - Mary Hall Road. Mary was an old maid school teacher who founded a school for girls in Northfield, MA, named Miss Hall's School for Girls. As far as I know, it is still there. When Mary retired, she came back and lived on the farm, and after her father passed away she managed the farm. There were 12 to 15 Jersey cows and all the other things for a farm, and she had a boss farmer named Gardner.
Mary being a teacher and interested in history thought that a marker should be put up at the site where the Stanton house stood before it was torn down when the road was straightened. She engaged a stone cutter from the Smith Granite Quarry up in Westerly. He came down and they went out and picked a boulder that the stone cutter thought would be appropriate. With his hand drills and other tools, he managed to split the stone and then he leaded it. The next job was to move the stone to the site.
Mary had her boss farmer Gardner take the good sized pair of Jersey oxen out to the field, and he managed to tip the stone over into the stone drag. He hooked onto the front of it to move it up to the site and nothing moved. Mary, being a school teacher, had no idea what the weight of a stone that size was. She sent Gardner down to the other Davis family at the Greenhaven Inn, the Daniel Davis farm next door to us [the Stanton-Davis Homestead]. They brought up their big pair of Holsteins, then both yoke of oxen were hitched up to the drag, and still nothing happened. Gardner was sent to my family's house, I guess it was my great grandfather or great great grandfather, and we had Devons and short-horn milking cattle. We had a pair of Devons and a pair of big short-horns, and they were both good-sized teams. Gardner wanted to borrow one pair of oxen. The Davis who was there told him no, that he would need to teams and to take both of them. Davis sent his oxen and their driver, who had both teams chained together at the yoke.
They went up and lined up all the oxen with a long center chain going from the stone drag up through to the lead oxen, the front team. And then each pair of oxen had a chain going from their yoke to that center master chain. They started them up and finally got them to pull together, and they slid along pretty good. After starting them up and stopping several times on the way up there, because it was a dirt road and probably some gravel, they got it up there and managed to set it up.
Now I don't know the date it was set up there, but that is the story of who put it up there. Miss Mary Hall was the financial backer, and the number of oxen and where they came from and who did the job. The house was torn down in the 1880s to straighten the road, and it must have been a short time after the stone was moved up there, but the exact date I don't know.
The above story was told by John Whit Davis, and it was told to him by his father John L. Davis.
