Meantime, a couple of years earlier, Stone had begun a tour in the State senate that was to last for practically the remainder of his life. In 1784 he also returned to the Continental Congress, where he served for a few days as acting President but resigned before the year expired to resume his law practice. His last act of public service occurred the following year, when he and two others represented Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference.
In 1787 Stone’s wife, whose health had been failing for more than a decade, passed away at the age of 34. The grief-stricken Stone abandoned his work, declined to attend the Constitutional Convention to which he had been elected, and decided to visit England. A few months later, though only in his mid-forties, he died suddenly while awaiting a vessel at Alexandria, Va. Three of his children survived him. Stone is buried in the family graveyard adjacent to Habre-de-Venture.
Surmounting the poverty that forced him to come to the American Colonies from Ireland as an indentured servant to an ironmaster, George Taylor climbed to the top of the industry. In the process, merging politics with commerce, he gained enough distinction in county and State affairs to win election to the Continental Congress—his only service on the national level. Even then, he attended only a few months, just long enough to sign the Declaration. He contributed more directly to the cause of liberty as an ironmaster, producing ordnance for the Continental Army.
When Taylor was about 20 years of age, he indentured himself and emigrated from northern Ireland, where he had been born in 1716, to Pennsylvania. He began as a laborer and then became a clerk at Warwick Furnace, in Chester County, and within 3 years rose to bookkeeper-manager of nearby Coventry Forge, another enterprise of his employer. In 1742, the year after the latter died, Taylor acquired his business when he married his widow; she bore him a son and daughter.
In the mid-1750’s Taylor moved northeastward to Bucks County, where he and a partner leased Durham Furnace, about 2 miles south of the Northampton County line and 10 miles south of Easton. Apparently after 1763 Taylor lived much of the time at or near Easton and acquired property there. In 1768 his wife died; he subsequently sired five children by his housekeeper out of wedlock. The year of his wife’s death, he built a home about 15 miles west of the city on a 331-acre tract he had purchased the year before. In 1771 he leased most of the land out as a farm, and 5 years later sold the house and land.