Memorials › Rebecca Ann Bryan Boone

Rebecca Ann Bryan Boone

9 Jan 1739 – 18 Mar 1813

Birth	9 Jan 1739
Death	18 Mar 1813
Cemetery	Frankfort Cemetery Frankfort , Franklin County , Kentucky , USA
Added by	Autbreeze on 24 Jun 2023
FaG	https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/2340

Bio

American Pioneer. She is best remembered as the wife of famed American pioneer and frontiersman Daniel Boone. While no actual portrait of her exists when she was living, people who knew her said that when she met her future husband, she was nearly his height and very attractive with black hair and dark eyes. Born Rebecca Ann Bryan, at the age of 10, she moved with her Quaker grandparents, Morgan and Martha Bryan, to the Yadkin River Valley in the backwoods of North Carolina. There she met Daniel Boone in 1753 and married him three years when she was 17. The union would produce ten children. She also took in her new husband's two young orphaned nephews, who lived with them in North Carolina until the family left for Kentucky in 1773. Without any formal education, she was reputed to be an experienced midwife, the family doctor, leather tanner, sharpshooter, and linen-maker, resourceful and independent in the isolated wilderness areas that she and her large, combined family often found themselves. In the autumn of 1773, she came through the Cumberland Gap with her family and 50 others under the leadership of William Russell, though they were turned back by the violent resistance of the local tribes to British colonization west of the Allegheny Mountains. In 1775, her husband took the family to the Kentucky River where, on behalf of the Transylvania Company, he and Richard Henderson laid out Fort Boonesborough. In May 1778, she left Kentucky under a cloud of rumors that her husband, who had been captured by the Chillicothe Shawnee tribe, had turned Tory. She returned to her parents' settlement in North Carolina with five of her children, leaving behind her daughter Jemima who by then had married. In June 1778, her husband escaped his captors, returned to his family in North Carolina, and convinced her to leave again for Kentucky, this time with nearly 100 of their relatives. They departed in September 1779, the largest emigration to date to travel through the Cumberland Gap. By late October 1779, they reached Fort Boonesborough, but conditions were so bad that they left on Christmas Day, during what Kentuckians later called the "Hard Winter," to found a new settlement, Boone's Station, with 15 to 20 families on Boone's Creek about six miles northwest, near what is now Athens, Kentucky. By the following spring, she and her husband moved to a cabin several miles southwest on Marble Creek. In 1781, she lived in a double cabin with five of her children still living at home, the six children of her widowed uncle James Bryan, as well as her daughter Susannah with her husband, and with two rr three children of their own, a household of almost 20 people. In 1783, she and her family moved where, for the next few years, she assisted her husband in creating a landing site at the mouth of Limestone Creek for flatboats coming down the Ohio River from Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania. They lived in a cabin built out of an old boat (on what is now Front Street in Maysville, Kentucky) and she ran the tavern kitchen and oversaw the seven slaves they owned. In 1787, her husband was elected to the Virginia legislature as Bourbon County's representative, and she moved with him to Richmond, Virginia and their youngest child, leaving the tavern in the hands of their daughter, Rebecca, and husband, Philip Goe. In 1788, they moved to Point Pleasant (now in West Virginia) in the Kanawha Valley, settling on the south side of the river almost opposite the mouth of Campbell's Creek. In 1799, they followed their youngest son, Nathan, to Spain's Alta Louisiana (Upper Louisiana, now Missouri, about 45 miles west/northwest of Saint Louis) in the Femme Osage Valley. She died there after a brief illness at the age of 74 in the home of her daughter, Jemima Boone Callaway, and was interred at the nearby Old Bryan Family Cemetery, on the bank of Tuque Creek near Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, her remains, along with her husband's were reportedly disinterred and reburied in Frankfort, Kentucky.