George L. Stone, a Young Man Of High Moral Principles

George Lewis Stone (1862-1899)

Born on March 9, 1862, George Lewis Stone was the son of Lewis G. Stone and his first wife, Mary Lewis Fairbanks Stone. His father was born in Maine, served in the Civil War and was discharged with a disability in 1862.

Following his service, Lewis Stone worked at the Railroad Car Shops in South Dedham and the family lived with George’s grandmother, Priscilla Cushman Fairbanks, who ran a boardinghouse.  Mary Fairbanks Stone died in 1881 and was buried in Old Parish Cemetery in Norwood. Lewis Stone remarried and moved to Boston.

Although he only lived in South Dedham, later Norwood, for a few years, George Lewis Stone later became a well-known figure in town. For a time, he was the editor of Norwood’s first newspaper, the Review, which merged with the Advertiser to become the Norwood Advertiser and Review. It was in that newspaper that his obituary appeared.

The obituary described the young man as being “of high moral principles but with nothing of the prig or milksop about him. He was greatly interested in temperance as evidenced by his earnestness in the work of the Norwood Reform Club.” Stone was also interested in artistic amateur photography, and was a member of the Camera Club of Medford.

After leaving Norwood, he was employed in whole sale and jobbing houses in Boston and at the time of his death he was head bookkeeper in a whole sale house. He was married twice. His first wife May MacKenzie, a Norwood native, died in 1893 in Boston. He was survived by his second wife, August Sutherland, from Washington, DC.

George Lewis Stone died on January 13, 1899 a few days after undergoing an operation for a disease of the digestive organs. His body was returned to Norwood, where he was interred in the family lot in Old Parish Cemetery alongside his mother, Mary Fairbanks Stone, and, later, his father, Lewis G. Stone, who passed away in 1907.