Mary Boone Bryan
Campbell County, Campbell County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Mary Boone Bryan. Born in Pa. in 1736, she was the daughter of Squire & Sarah Morgan Boone and younger sister of Daniel Boone. Family moved to N.C. when she was 14. There she met, and in 1755, married William Bryan. With 10 children, they migrated to Ky. via the Cumberland Gap in fall of 1779 & settled Bryan Station. Lost three sons & husband that winter. (Reverse) Mary took her children back to her home in N.C. in 1780. After the Rev. War, they returned to Ky. She was living in Campbell Co. by 1795. In 1813, paid her brother Daniel’s acct. debt to John Grant. She died in 1819 and was buried on son Samuel’s farm at Grant’s Lick; her remains were moved to Oakland Cemetery in 1929.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
A younger sister of Daniel Boone, Mary Boone Bryan was born in Pennsylvania in 1736 and married William Bryan in North Carolina in 1755. In the fall of 1779 she and her husband led their ten children through the Cumberland Gap to help settle Bryan Station in Kentucky—only to lose her husband and three sons that first hard winter. She endured, returning to the frontier after the Revolution and living out her life in Campbell County.
Why it matters
Her life reveals the wrenching cost frontier women bore in the settlement of Kentucky, standing alongside the more famous men of the Boone family in the westward story.
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Related people
- · Mary Boone Bryan
- · Daniel Boone
- · William Bryan
Related events
- · Settlement of Bryan Station
Themes & tags
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