Joseph Benton Stayman (1832-1901)

Joseph B. Stayman was born on July 18, 1832 in Hampden Township, Pennsylvania to Christian and Eliza Stayman. His father served for thirty-one years as a trustee of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The younger Stayman attended the preparatory school there and then entered the college proper in 1850 with the class of 1854. He withdrew before graduating and went into business in nearby Mechanicsburg.

Stayman maintained his business career until his retirement. He left it only to enlist very briefly as a private in the Pennsylvania Militia in a company his father raised during the September 1862 emergency during the Civil War. His brother Milton, who also attended Dickinson College with the class of 1856, joined with him in this same unit.

Stayman married Mary A. Shelley of Shiremanstown, Pennsylvania, and the couple had three sons and a daughter. One of these sons, Joseph Webster Stayman, graduated from Dickinson with the class of 1898. Joseph Benton Stayman died on July 14, 1901. He was four days short of his sixty-ninth birthday.