HerStory: Bringing Woman's Past to the Present: Lydia Bean

Lydia (Russell) Bean was born in 1726 in Rappahanock County, Virginia. She was the daughter of Lt. Col. William James Russell and Martha Graydon. In 1741, Lydia married William Bean, a friend and traveling companion of Daniel Boone. Lydia and William had 10 children. They moved from Virginia in 1769 to what would later become the state of Tennessee. Their first born son Russell was born the same year and is reported to be the first white person born in Tennessee.

Lydia was captured in July 1776 by hostile Cherokee Indians prior to an attack on the Wataugu settlement. The Watauga settlement was located south of the Holston River, on the Watauga and Nolichucky Rivers in the colony of North Carolina, now Tennessee. She was intercepted as she made her way from her home on Boone’s Creek to Sycamore Shoals. She was sent to the Overhill Towns, a Cherokee village, and was sentenced to execution. She was actually being tied to a stake when Nancy Ward, Beloved Mother of the Cherokee, exercised her right as a woman of the tribe (the women usually decided the fate of captives) to spare Lydia from death. She took the injured Mrs. Bean into her own home to nurse her back to health. In return Lydia taught Nancy and the other women of their tribe many new and useful ways of the white man, and it is said that Lydia was the one who introduced cows into Cherokee society by giving some of her own cattle to Nancy Ward.

Several members of the Bean family were killed by hostile Indians, including a brother and one of her daughters. Lydia herself lived to be 62 years of age and she died on June 18, 1788 in Grainger County, Tennessee.

The introduction of European ways into Nancy Ward's tribe by Lydia Bean helped to effectively change the gender dynamics of Cherokee society. The men began to take the place of women as farmers while the women were expected to do common white women's chores such as making clothes and making butter and cheese.