Papers : 1774-1933.

            Joel Stone was a Loyalist and founder of Gananoque, Ontario, who came from Guilford, and later Litchfield, Connecticut.   He was the second son of Stephen Stone (b.1721) and his wife Rebecca Bishop.   In 1780 he married Leah Moore (d.1793) and they had two children, William Moore and Mary, who reached adulthood. He married, secondly, Abigail Dayton (nee Cogswell). Mary Stone married Charles MacDonald, and records relating to their children, William Stone, John Lewis, and Charles Joel, can be found among the Joel Stone Papers. 
At the time of the American Revolution, Joel Stone was a merchant in Woodbury, Connecticut, and his Loyalist sympathies resulted in the local revolutionaries confiscating his property. Like so many other Loyalists, he was compelled to flee to the safety of New York, where he served in the local militia, and established a business. In 1783 he went to England in an attempt to gain compensation for his losses, but it was not until 1786 that he was able to come to British North America. For a short period of time he resided in Cornwall, then moved to a 700-acre piece of land on the west side of the Gananoque River where he established a number of businesses and operated a ferry across the Gananoque River. He held several key positions in local civic affairs, including collector of customs, roads commissioner, justice of the peace, and colonel of the 2nd Regiment of Leeds Militia. In 1815 he turned over the major portion of his business interests to his son-in-law Charles MacDonald and spent his later years in retirement.
After Joel Stone's death in 1833, the focus of the material in the Papers is on the MacDonald branch of the family.            

            The Joel Stone Papers are arranged in chronological order on two microfilm reels as follows in the following manner:
  Reel 1, 1774-1877, consists of correspondence, principally between family members, some of whom remained in the United States at the end of the American Revolution;  a business contract;  legal documents, such as articles of agreement, warrants, complaints, instructions, memorials, certificates, receipts, notices of marriage bonds, and other documents;  the will of John Moore, dated 1780, and letters concerning the estate of the late John Moore;  military documents for the years, 1810-1820, which include, a commission for William N. Stone as a Lieutenant in the Leeds Militia, 1808, returns for companies attached to the 2nd Regiment of Leeds Militia, 1814-1815, and a list of militia pensions for widows, orphans and soldiers, 1817;  family histories, including a diary written by Dothe Stone, Joel Stone's sister, 1777-1792, which contains births and deaths, 1747-1768;  and a memo which includes a list of confirmations in the Baker family, 1832-1838.
 Reel 2, 1878-1933, contains family histories; papers relating to the families of Stone, Leaming and Bishop, 1878;  A Memoir of Joel Stone, compiled from letters and papers left by him at Gananoque, Canada;  a memorandum regarding the MacDonald family genealogy;  records for the counties of Glengarry and Leeds;  court documents;  miscellaneous documents (n.d.), chiefly military;  newspaper clippings relating to the history of Leeds County;  a fable written for publication in the Brockville Recorder;  and many other documents.              

            A brief typed description of each document can be found on the microfilm reels immediately preceding an item or group of items. The individual descriptions have been photocopied from the microfilm and assembled to form a combined table of contents and microfilm shelf list which is available in print with the Loyalist Collection Finding Aids and as a PDF in the electronic finding aids section.            

Researchers may wish to consult the following related material: The microfilm of the Joel Stone Papers, 1786 - 1873, which is held by Queen's University Archives, is available in the Loyalist Collection and is shelved at MIC-Loyalist FC LFR .S6J6P3.