Grand Chute family has ancestral ties to founder of Chilton
By Kara Patterson (who writes for Appleton Post-Crescent)
Oshkosh Northwestern
Printed Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Pioneer and Chilton founder Moses Stanton seems vibrat & present in the Grand Chute home of Mark & Melissa Baldwin, as if he were a long-lost relative come to visit.
Mark & the couple's daugter Rachel, are direct descendants of Stanton, whose father was black and whose mother was a member of the Narragansett Tribe.
They are six & seven generations removed, respectively, from the respected 1800s minister who left Rhode Island & eventually ended up in Chilton, where he assisted escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.
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"He set a good example for others," Rachel said she has learned. "He was always caring, kind & helpful."
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When her fourth-grade teacher at Badger Elementary School in Appleton asked students this month to write about a significant contributor to black history as part of BLACK HISTORY MONTH, Rachel chose to share what her family knows about her ancestor's life.
Unlike escaped slave James Andrew Jackson of Tennessee- who cleared nine acres of Heart of the Valley forest to found the town of Freedom & then moved on- Stanton made Chilton his lifelong home beginning in 1845.
The family has no photos of Stanton to display because none have been identified. But Melissa, who has spent at least a decade researching her husband's family tree, has collected a binder full of information that reveals Stanton's character.
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"He was someone who was very concerned about other's,"
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Melissa said.
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"If anybody was passing through the area they could stop & get fed. When slaves were on their way to Canada to get out of the United States we think he hid them in the caves in Chilton, somewhere where no one could find them."
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Rachel & her father are descended from Stanton's first wife, Maria ONion, who was American Indian. Records show that sometime after Onion's death Stanton married Catherine, the American Indian woman who is remembered as Chilton's first lady.
Chilton Mayor Bill Engler Jr. said his late grandfather, once an historian, interviewed Catherine Stanton in the early 1900s.
