William Stenton (c.1777-1863) was a Sheffield merchant and American trader.  His early experience was apparently in the cutlery warehouse of Miss Harrison (unidentified).  He later partnered William Greaves & Sons until 1817.   In the 1820s, he worked for Naylor & Sanderson, where he was known as ‘Devil Stenton’.   It was said that ‘the imprecations uttered against him by the cutlers were loud, bitter and deep from the manner in which they were treated by him’ (Callan, 1976¹).   Stenton left Naylor & Sanderson in 1829, when it was reorganised, and he became a partner in George Wostenholm & Son.  He helped launch that company’s American business, but the partnership was dissolved in 1831, after disagreements between Stenton and George Wostenholm.  

William Stenton became a merchant in his own right in Allen Street.   His son (by his wife Charlotte) was Robert Sutcliffe Stenton (1814-1876).   In 1832, they travelled together to New York, where William opened an office (William Stenton & Co) in Cliff Street.  By the end of the 1830s, Wm. Stenton & Son had been formed in Sheffield (Carver Street) and in New York (Maiden Lane, then John Street and later Pearl Street).  A Stenton advertisement in a Buffalo directory (1849) offered a wide range of cutlery and tools, including the ‘Tally Ho’ razors of Fenney.   Razors and other cutlery were also marked with Stenton’s own name.  One marking on Stenton razors was: ‘AGAIN SUPERIOR’.  Bowie knives were amongst the Stentons’ consignments.  One example (seen in a photograph sent to the author by Norm Flayderman) was stamped R. S. Stenton, with the slogan: ‘CAN CUT A BOW AND SPLIT A DOLLAR’.  An ornate presentation Bowie, marked ‘R. S. Stenton’, is also shown in Peterson (1958)².

William Stenton was enumerated in the Census (1841) as a 60-year-old merchant living in Nelson Place, Glossop Road, with his wife, Catherine.  William Stenton & Son was listed in Carver Street until 1845.  Robert, though, became a naturalised American in 1861 and lived with his family in Brooklyn.   He married Louisa Malcolm (1828-1908), the daughter of the Rev.  Howard Malcolm.  Their daughter, Alice Cornelia Driscoll Stenton, was born in about 1862.   Robert’s New York hardware agency sold a variety of products, including ploughs, steel, safes, all types of cutlery, and paints.  He sold muskets during the Civil War.  He also registered patents for hardware products and became involved in the manufacture of screws and nuts.  His father later joined him in America.  William Stenton died ‘gently, of old age’, aged 86, on 27 February 1863 at his son’s residence in Fordham, the Bronx (Sheffield Independent, 17, 18 March 1863).  He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Robert S. Stenton reputedly made a fortune in the steel and hardware business, though this was dissipated after the Civil War.  In the late 1860s, he and Louisa (perhaps lured by the prospect of riches on Wall Street) became commercial brokers.  In 1867, Stenton was bankrupt and his wife’s speculations had proved so disastrous that she re-mortgaged the family home in Brooklyn for $60,000 (New York Tribune, 10 June 1906).  In 1871, Robert and Louisa divorced.  Robert died in San Francisco from pneumonia on 24 May 1876.  He left no will, but papers filed by Louisa in 1889 stated that his estate was worth less than $800.  Louisa and her daughter, Alice, lived in a Brooklyn mansion on Washington Avenue and 189th Street, which became ‘a ramshackle old building set in a labyrinth of brush’ (New York Times, 12 June 1906).  Louisa was senile and Alice (who lived with her mother) was estranged from her husband (Richard Kinnan).   They were beset by financial problems and the machinations of their attorney, Burton Wilkes Gibson.  On 8 June 1906, Alice Kinnan was beaten to death on the veranda of the mansion.  Suspicion settled on Gibson, who was arrested and imprisoned, but later released.  

The murder, which was widely reported in The New York Times and other newspapers, remained unsolved.  Alice was buried in the Stenton vault in Green-Wood Cemetery.  Louisa died at Harrison, New York, on 22 December 1908, aged 80.  Gibson’s clients continued to disappear or die in strange circumstances, often after they had agreed to leave money to him in their wills.  In 1912, in another sensational case, he was tried twice for the murder of Rosa Menschik Szabo, a pretty Austrian woman who had drowned – or, according to the autopsy report on her exhumed body, had been strangled – when out boating with Gibson.  After ‘calmly awaiting arrest’ (according to one newspaper headline), he was acquitted of murder, but imprisoned on a lesser charge of grand larceny.  In 1919, Gibson was pardoned and released from Sing Sing prison, but his subsequent life is unknown.  His wife was apparently a widow in 1920.

^1. Callan, C Bernard, ‘Two Hundred Years of Special Steel’, Sanderson Kayser Magazine: Bi-Centenary Issue 2 (1976)

^2. Peterson, Harold L, American Knives: The First History and Collector’s Guide (Highland Park, NJ, 1958)