Captain Robert Bean died on November 17, 1824, in Sweetens Cove, Marion County, Tennessee, at the age of sixty. Family tradition records that he died beneath a large poplar tree while members of his family were gathering corn nearby. He was buried in the cemetery he had helped establish in Sweetens Cove, in what is now known as the Bean-Raulston Graveyard near South Pittsburg. His grave is believed to be the oldest marked burial in that section of the cemetery. Exactly one year before he died, on November 17, 1823, he had deeded land in Marion County to his son Jesse. The precision of that interval, land transferred to the next generation exactly twelve months before his death, may have been coincidence. It may also have been the act of a man who understood that his time was running short and wanted his affairs settled.
Robert Bean was born on May 3, 1764, in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, the son of Lieutenant John Bean and Elizabeth Henderson Bean. He came into the world on the edge of the colonial frontier, in a family already positioned at the boundary between settled and unsettled country, and he spent the rest of his life moving that boundary westward. By the time he died in Sweetens Cove he had covered the ground from colonial Virginia to revolutionary-era Tennessee to the earliest settled communities of the Sequatchie Valley, and he had left descendants spread across Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and beyond.
His service during the American Revolution placed him in significant company. Family histories and historical accounts describe him as a captain during the Indian Wars, a Tennessee Volunteer, a companion of Daniel Boone, and a participant in the Battle of King’s Mountain, fought on October 7, 1780, in the hill country on the border of North and South Carolina. King’s Mountain was one of the most consequential engagements of the southern campaign. Frontier militia forces defeated a Loyalist army under Major Patrick Ferguson, a victory that disrupted British strategy in the South at a moment when the Patriot cause in the region was under serious pressure. The men who fought there were not regular Continental soldiers but backcountry volunteers who came from the same communities and families that were simultaneously trying to survive on the frontier. Robert Bean was among them.
Around 1781, he married Martha Womack, the daughter of Isham Womack, born March 20, 1758, in Amelia County, Virginia. Together they raised eleven known children: Lemuel (1782–1849), Rhoda (1783–1847), Obadiah Franklin (1785–1840), John (1788–1846), Elizabeth (1789), William (1791–1839), Robert (1794–1858), Oliver (1796), Sarah called Sally (1798–1868), Jesse called Jep (1800–1880), and Martha (1803). What happened within that family over the following generation produced one of the more interesting details in the Bean family history. Several of Robert’s sons, among them Lemuel, Obadiah, William, and Robert, began spelling the family name as Beene rather than Bean. The reason for the shift is not documented in any surviving record, but the result was a surname split that ran through Robert’s descendants for generations afterward. Both Bean and Beene appear among his descendants today, depending on which branch of the family a line descends through.
In 1807, Robert received two land grants on the Elk River in Franklin County, Tennessee, part of the steady westward movement that had characterized his life since Virginia. Franklin County was frontier country at that point, recently opened to settlement and still in the early stages of organization. From there he continued moving, eventually settling his family in Sweetens Cove in what became Marion County, Tennessee. The cove was a secluded valley enclosed by ridges and mountains, the kind of geography that shaped the communities inside it by limiting access and encouraging the close interdependence that isolated settlements develop. The Bean family became deeply connected to the other pioneer families of Sweetens Cove and the surrounding Sequatchie Valley, among them the Raulston, Wynne, Patton, Payne, Womack, and Selman families. Those connections produced marriages across generations that wove the Bean line into the broader fabric of Marion County’s founding families.
The descendants who carried that line forward did not stay in Tennessee. John L. Beene, a grandson of Captain Robert Bean, settled in Arkansas, and through him the family extended into the next generation of southern migration. Among the Arkansas descendants were Millie Catherine Beene, who married George Washington King; Eliza Beene, who married James Houston Raulston; and Amanda Beene, who married Lemuel J. Wynne. The Raulston and Wynne names appearing again in Arkansas, carried by people who had married into Robert Bean’s line, reflects how thoroughly the pioneer family networks of Sweetens Cove reproduced themselves as their members moved westward.
Robert Bean lived through the Revolutionary War, the settlement of Tennessee, and the transformation of the Sequatchie Valley from frontier territory into established agricultural community. He was sixty years old when he died under that poplar tree in Sweetens Cove, with his family nearby and his land already passed to the next generation. The cemetery where he was buried still stands. The families whose histories run through him are still tracing those connections more than two centuries after his death.