Aston presents an impressive sight when seen across its park, the wall of which wraps its way around the eastern periphery of Shifnal. The house has an early eighteenth-century front of perhaps 1720, with seven bays and three storeys, now with a single storey Greek Doric portico on the centre ground floor bay, below a parapet and with painted quoins and window surrounds that add definition when seen across the park. Yet a cruel pebbledash render is not kind to the house when seen in close proximity. The architect of the house is not recorded, yet it still retains its fielded panelled entrance hall with bolection moulded fireplace and a handsome staircase rising around three sides of a well, with turned balusters and Doric column newels.

Aston was acquired in the mid eighteenth century by George Austin (1710–1774). The son of a Shifnal mercer, Austin established himself in Carolina, developing tobacco plantations, including the Shifnal Plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina, and trading in slaves. His trading company, Austin Laurens and Appleby – which included as partners his nephew George Appleby and the eventual President of Congress, Henry Laurens – was, in fact, the largest slave trading house in North America.

Austin returned, bringing two slaves with him, and established himself at Aston Hall in 1762, leaving his daughter, Eleanor (1738–1826), in Carolina. Eleanor, against her father’s wishes, married John Moultrie (1729–1798), an Edinburgh-trained doctor who in 1764 was appointed a member of the council of East Florida and, in 1770, established the Rosetta Plantation a 14,000 acre property in Florida where he successfully grew indigo, sugar, rice and oranges. Moultrie became Lieutenant-Governor of Florida in 1771 and was active in road building there, but with the return of Spanish rule in 1783, he sold as much property as he could, returning with his wife to England in the following year.

When the Moultries settled at Aston, the property was managed by trustees and Mrs Moultrie had only an annuity whilst Moultrie himself had no access to the capital value of the estate. Their elder son, John (1764–1823), who was married to Catherine Gaillard Ball, the daughter of Elias Ball of Wambaw Plantation, succeeded to the estate. Their full-length portrait, by John Francis Rigaud of circa 1782, shows them with their young son, George Austin Moultrie, who eventually succeeded them and was seated at Aston in 1837.