Stapleton: From England to Revolution

In 1676, a young English physician crossed the Atlantic with a medical bag and no recorded past. By the time he died in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1706, he had built a practice, a family, and a name that would follow his descendants for the next three centuries.

Stapleton: From England to Revolution traces five generations of one family across the long arc of early America - from the tobacco parishes of colonial Virginia to the Scots-Irish frontier of the Carolina backcountry, from the swamps of Francis Marion's brigade to the first federal census of the new republic. It is the story of Dr. Thomas William Stapleton I, who arrived with nothing but his training and made himself indispensable. Of Thomas II and Thomas III, who carried the name south and west as the colonies expanded. Of Solomon Stapleton, who knelt in cold water at Tearcoat Swamp in 1780 waiting for a whippoorwill to signal the attack, and who stood at a mill yard two years later and kept his hands quiet at his sides when every instinct told him otherwise.

Built from primary sources - land grants, court records, muster rolls, census pages, and the 1760 Dobbs County entry that marks Solomon's first appearance in the public record at seventeen years old - this is narrative family history that does not invent what it does not know, and does not apologize for what the records cannot tell us.

The Stapletons were not famous. They were the people the famous ones depended on.