Thomas Shone at Stanton

Thomas Shone at Stanton

Here is the potted history I’ve been promising (threatening?) to write for ages.

Anything to get my web master off my back … also I thought it was appropriate that it be written as we approach the property’s 190th birthday this December.

On 23rd December 1816, Thomas Shone arrived in the Derwent Valley, at what was to become the property Stanton.

Thomas came from Sydney, having served four years of a sentence for passing a forged note in Shrewsbury, England, where he worked in a solicitors’ office.

His pardon came gift-wrapped with a 60 acre land grant and three convicts, and with the Van Diemen’s Land hierarchy trying to ‘domesticate’ the areas outside of Hobart Town, Shone was given a wooded tract of land just outside of the fledgling township of New Norfolk.

This area had been settled largely by free settlers from Norfolk Island, displaced by that island’s closure as a convict ‘depot’ in 1808.

The area still is home to the descendants of these rugged individuals.

The name ‘Stanton’ was chosen by Thomas as an acknowledgement of his home village of Stanton-upon-Hine, in the old county of Salop, England.

He wasted no time in clearing land, erecting rough fencing for stock, finding a water supply (the area now known as Magra was originally called Back River, after the small river near Stanton) and erecting rough shelters.