Young Rebecca Bryan and Her Marriage to Daniel Boone
Rebecca Boone inscription on her grave monument in Frankfort Cemetery, Frankfort, Kentucky (Photo by Robert Alvin Crum). More images shown below.
Robert Alvin Crum copyright 29 January 2024
There are literally volumes written about Daniel Boone, but what about his bride Rebecca Bryan? This is the story about her young life and her marriage to Daniel Boone.
Rebecca Bryan was born on January 9, 1739, and her parents were Joseph Bryan and Hester Simpson. She was born in Opequon, Frederick County, Virginia. Rebecca’s sister, Martha Bryan, was also a daughter of Hester Simpson who died about 1740. After his wife, Hester, died, Joseph married Alice Linville about 1740 or 41, and family tradition says that, at an early age, Martha and Rebecca went to live with and were raised by their grandparents Morgan and Martha Strode Bryan.
Rebecca’s father, Joseph Bryan (1720-1805), was the oldest son out of nine children born to Morgan and Martha Strode Bryan. Just like his father, Joseph’s life-long profession was to become a land speculator.
In 1747, Morgan Bryan and his wife, Martha, decided to move with their large extended family to North Carolina. They, along with most of their children and grandchildren, left their lands in Virginia to settle in the backcountry of North Carolina in the Forks of the Yadkin. Their oldest son, Joseph Bryan, and his second wife, Alice Linville, along with their children, stayed behind in Virginia until 1756, so they could tie up the loose ends of the family’s land speculating business. Joseph’s two daughters by his first wife, Martha and Rebecca, were being raised by their grandparents, Morgan and Martha Bryan, so they accompanied their grandparents in 1747 on their first trek into North Carolina. Morgan and Martha also had a daughter, Mary Bryan, who married Thomas Curtis. Since they both died in Virginia before this 1747 migration, their daughter, Mary Curtis, also accompanied her grandparents into North Carolina. It’s believed that Morgan Bryan, Jr. (1728-1804) also stayed in Virginia for a few more years until he settled affairs and later moved south to North Carolina.
When Rebecca arrived in North Carolina at age eight, she and her sister, Martha, lived with their grandparents, Morgan and Martha Bryan, and it was probably at their “mansion house” on the 550-acre tract located at “the Bend” on the Yadkin River. Once her grandmother died in 1762, and her grandfather in 1763, this tract of land was split between her uncles William and Thomas Bryan.
Daniel Boone’s sister, Mary, and William Bryan (Rebecca Bryan’s uncle and son of Morgan Bryan, Sr.) were married in 1755. It was at their wedding that Daniel Boone and Rebecca Bryan first met one another. Olive Boone confirmed this, when Lyman Draper interviewed Nathan and Olive Boone in October 1851, and she added, “… I suppose if there was any ‘shining of eyes,’ it must have been there.” Olive Boone continued her recollection by saying,
“The second time they met was at some place where several young people met to eat cherries. They sat upon a ridge of green turf under the cherry trees, and Daniel Boone was beside Rebecca Bryan and doubtless turning over in his own mind whether she would make him a good companion. At that time, he took out his knife and, taking up one corner of her white apron, began to cut and stab holes through it, to which she said nothing nor offered any resistance. Daniel Boone afterward used to say he did it to try her temper, thinking if it was fiery, she would fly into a passion.”
When Daniel and Rebecca married, it wasn’t in a church where many wedding ceremonies are performed today. Part of that was due to a shortage of churches and clergy in the North Carolina backcountry. Tradition says that they were married in a civil service by Daniel’s father, Squire, who was a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and he was able to do so based on the law that follows:
“For want of men in Holy Orders, both the Members of the Council and Justices of the Peace are empower’d by the Laws of that County to marry all those who will not take One another’s Word; but for the ceremony of Christening their children, they trust that to chance. In 1669, because of the absence of clergymen in the colony, marriage was made a civil contract. By the vestry law of 1715, magistrates were permitted to perform the marriage ceremony, ‘in such parishes where no minister shall be resident,’ and in 1741 the right was confined to the clergy of the Church of England and magistrates.” (See History of the Dividing Line, page 72 and note 39, and Colonial Records, Vol. XXIII, p. 3.)
Rebecca married Daniel on August 14,1756 in Rowan County, North Carolina. The wedding was probably at either Daniel’s parents at what’s referred to as Dutchman’s Creek or at the Bryan’s “mansion house,” but it’s not documented. Olive Boone advised Draper in 1851 that, “When they were married, two other couples were married at the same time.”
At the time of their marriage, there were no images or paintings of the young couple, and photography did not yet exist. In Draper’s “The Life of Daniel Boone,” one can find a physical description of Daniel Boone as follows:
“Behold that young man exhibiting such unusual firmness and energy of character, five feet eight inches in height, with broad chest and shoulders, his form gradually tapering downwards to his extremities; his hair moderately black; blue eyes arched with yellowish eyebrows; his lips thin with a mouth particularly wide; a countenance fair and ruddy with a nose a little bordering on the Roman order.”
There’s also a physical description of Rebecca as follows:
“Rebecca Bryan, whose brow had been fanned by the breezes of seventeen summers, was like Rebecca of old, ‘very fair to look upon,’ with jet Black hair and eyes, complexion rather dark, and something over the common size of her sex, her whole demeanor expressive of her child-like alertness, pleasing in her address, and unaffectedly kind in all her deportment. Never was there a more gentle, affectionate, forbearing creature than this same fair youthful bride of the Yadkin.”
In his interview with Lyman Draper in 1851, Nathan Boone (youngest child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone) advised that, “After he was married, Father lived for a while in a house in my grandfather’s [Squire Boone’s] yard and then settled on a place of his own. Daniel Bryan (nephew of Daniel Boone and first cousin to Rebecca) wrote in a letter to Lyman Draper on February 17, 1843 that, “At about 21 years old he [Daniel] Married Rebecka Bryan Daughter of Joseph Bryan in the Neighborhood of Bryans Settlement & settled himself on a small Creek Called Sugartree four miles from My father where he cleared a small farm on which he lived until they had five Children.”
The farm on which they settled at Sugartree Creek was six miles north of where Daniel’s parents lived on what was known as Dutchman’s Creek. This Sugartree Creek location was only four miles from Rebecca’s grandparents, Morgan and Martha Bryan, and many of her Bryan uncles, aunts and cousins. At the time of their marriage, Daniel and Rebecca “adopted” his brother Israel’s two sons, Jesse and Jonathan, and they lived with them at Sugartree Creek. Daniel and Rebecca enjoyed a long marriage of fifty-seven years, and she gave birth to their ten children.
While living at Sugartree Creek from 1756 to 1767, their first five children were born. However, Susannah, their third child, was born in Virginia in 1760, when the family fled there during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Their fifth child, and my direct ancestor, Lavina, was born at Sugartree Creek in 1766, and then the Boone clan migrated to the Upper Yadkin in 1767. This is confirmed during Reverend John Shane’s interview in 1842 with Daniel Bryan when he said, “Daniel Boone settled within four miles of my father William Bryan’s, where he remained until the growth of his family (having several children in his family) and the scarcity of game, lead him to remove to the head of the Adkin,….” In addition to all the work required to care for her home and family, stories told by her children mention that Rebecca also worked as a midwife, linen maker, leather tanner and sharpshooter.
Sources:
Belue, Ted Franklin, Editor, The Life of Daniel Boone by Lyman C. Draper, Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 1998.
Boyd, William K., William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, The North Carolina Historical Commission, Edwards & Broughton Company, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1929.
Draper, Lyman Copeland, Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
Hammond, Neil O., My Father Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, The University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, Kentucky, 1999.
Kamper, Ken, An Accurate Summary of the Life of Daniel Boone, Daniel Boone History Research – Newsletter No. 6, December 2021.
Kamper, Ken, A Researcher’s Understanding on the Boone Family Move to North Carolina, No. PK17.0211, February 2017.
Manuscript Collection, The State Historical Society of Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri,
Martin-Wall History Room, Davie County Public Library, Mocksville, North Carolina.
Rowan County Register of Deeds, Salisbury, North Carolina.
Spraker, Hazel Atterbury, The Boone Family, The Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont, 1922.
U.S. Quaker Meeting Records 1681-1935.
Weiss, Kathryn H., Daniel Bryan, Nephew of Daniel Boone: His Narrative and Other Stories, Self-published by Kathryn H. Weiss, Forbestown, California, 2008.
Weiss, Katherine, Morgan Bryan, Senior’s “Original Eleven” Anson (Rowan) County North Carolina Land Grants, Katherine Weiss, Forbestown, California, 2006.
