Edith Staton

Edith Staton Dies; Blair Descendant Wednesday, July 4, 2001

Edith Blair Staton, 104, a descendant of a prominent political family who did volunteer and charitable work in the Washington area until moving to Massachusetts in 1972, died of a kidney ailment June 30, 2001 at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mrs. Staton was credited with being the last of the Blairs to have been born at Blair House, the stately structure across from the White House that since the 1940s has been used as a guest house for kings, prime ministers and other dignitaries.

Her great-grandfather, Francis Preston Blair, edited the Washington Globe, which is said to have been the forerunner of the Congressional Record. Her grandfather, Montgomery Blair, was counsel for the runaway slave in the Dred Scott case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her father, Montgomery Blair Jr., was a well-known lawyer in his own right.

Her mother, Edith Draper Blair, was the daughter of Massachusetts Gov. Eben Sumner Draper and co-founder of the Potomac School in Washington. Mrs. Staton was among the first to graduate from the school, which is now in McLean.

Mrs. Staton did volunteer work in hospitals during World War I. In the early 1920s, she chaired an education subcommittee of the Girl Scouts of the United States that developed the official Brownies program. A grass-roots Brownies program had been in existence since the mid-1910s.

Throughout her life, Mrs. Staton donated Thomas Sully portraits to government agencies. In the 1950s and 1960s, she counseled pregnant teenagers in Washington.

When she was 102, she visited an elementary school near Boston and answered students' questions about longevity. "I recommend you take plenty of exercise and don't eat too much candy between meals," she told them.

In 1917, she married Adolphus Staton, who retired as a Navy rear admiral and held the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. He died in 1964.

Her daughter, Lucy McCabe, died of cancer in 1973.