Dean Cemetery

The historic Dean Family Cemetery, near Cedarville and Jamestown in Greene County, Ohio, was begun along a fork of Caesar's Creek, shortly after the family of Daniel Dean, a Scots-Irish immigrant, had relocated his family there from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, in September 1812. Dean and a partner, Henry Barnes, had enjoyed a lucrative milling business in Kentucky since 1790, but both were Covenanter Presbyterians. As such, they became increasingly appalled at the recent influx of former Deep South plantation owners, who brought with them into frontier Kentucky their "peculiar custom" of human slavery. Then two men bought land in Ohio in 1803, when it was made a Free State; but sadly, a land swindle was under way, so it took eight years for the men to perfect their title to 2,000 acres they had puchased, east of what's now Xenia, Ohio. Using three wagons pulled by teams of oxen, the men in 1812, began moving north, across the Ohio River and past Fort Washington (Cincinnati) northeast into Ohio's wilderness. Along with Daniel, a native of Tobermore, Ulster, Ireland, was his wife, Jennet "Jenny" Steele Dean, fornerly of the pioneer Steeles of Augusta County, Virginia. Once the Deans and Barneses arrived where now stands the Dean Cemetery, they found a boulder, some 20 feet in circumference, which made them an ideal 'table' on which to spread the first full meal they enjoyed on their new land. Generations of Deans, beginning with Daniel, Jennet and their progeny, since have been interred in the cemetery, surrounded now by a sturdy stone fence. Brave Daniel, at age 19, had made the treacherous Atlantic crossing alone to try and learn the fate of his father, Sgt. George Roger Dean, who with two brothers had disappeared after having fought in Pennsylvania's Colonial Line during the American Revolution. Young Daniel, after arriving penniless in Phliadelphia, wandered across Pennsylvania, Maryland and much of Virginia seeking his father whom he finally located on a homestead in Montgomery County, Kentucky. Roger Dean, having long since assumed that his Irish family had perished, had settled down in the bluegrass with a woman named Rebecca. Family legend says the woman, a local postmistress, had stealthily intercepted letters from Roger's first wife, Mary Campbell, who had written him faithfully from the Old Country. Once Daniel learned Roger's whereabouts, he hurriedly set about to bring his mother and younger sister, also a Mary, from Ulster to the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. When the women reached that port in 1790, the mother and daughter were in peril of being sold into indentured servitude to work off the cost of their ocean fare. Daniel, after running and riding through miles of Kentucky and Carolina wilderness, finally arrived breathless in Wilmington, just in time to rescue his mother and sister from their chagrin. Returning west, Daniel in 1791 wed Jennet Steele who was daughter of an American Patriot who lived near Steele's Tavern. First, Daniel had to agree with Jenny's father that he would build her a separate house of her own in Kentucky so she would never be dominated by the newly-arrived Campbells. Daniel did, indeed, build her a secod house; but both Mary Campbells became faithful live-in housekeepers for the younger Deans. The elder Mary never challenged the second family that her husband, Roger Dean, had begun with Rebecca. After 1813, generations of Deans, includng the 11 children of patriarch Daniel and Jennet, would live and thrive on lands around the fine stone home that son Joseph Dean and his wife Hannah Boggs Dean built there in 1823. That historic fam home, with wings long since added, still stands as part of the Dean Family Farm national historic site, not far from the Dean Cemetery off U.S. Highway 35 near Ballard Road.