Francis Browne Deane (25 September 1796–26 November 1868), iron manufacturer and president of the Lynchburg and Danville Railroad Company, was born at the Deanery in Cartersville, Cumberland County, and was the son of Francis Browne Deane, a native of Galway, Ireland, and Nancy, or Ann, Hughes Woodson Deane, a member of the family that owned most of the land where Cartersville had been founded. Throughout his life, even after the death of his father, he identified himself as F. B. Deane Jr. At age eighteen Deane entered Hampden-Sydney College. Most likely he served in the field with a militia company for a fortnight during the War of 1812. Deane attended Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) in 1814 and Hampden-Sydney College in 1816 before returning to Cartersville to work in his father's business concerns. In 1822 he purchased an interest in a Cumberland County flour mill along Muddy Creek.

On 3 January 1827 Deane executed a bond in Goochland County and on 16 January married Ariana Bethia Cunningham, daughter of Edward Cunningham, who owned and managed a large flour mill and other businesses in Richmond. Deane and his wife had three sons (one of whom died in infancy) and one daughter. Early in the 1830s the family moved to Buckingham County, where he had inherited and operated Bear Garden iron furnace. By 1835 that furnace was producing between thirty and forty tons of iron per week. In 1837 Deane and his brothers-in-law, Edward Cunningham and John Atkinson Cunningham, incorporated the Tredegar Iron Company, which merged with the Virginia Foundry Company in 1838 to establish what later became Tredegar Iron Works, the first large-scale commercial foundry in Richmond. The financial panic of 1837 and the lack of necessary waterpower because of improvements being made to the James River and Kanawha Canal slowed development of the foundry, and Deane resigned as president, considerably in debt, in 1842.

While in Richmond, Deane invested in and furnished iron for the construction of the first two iron steamboats designed to operate on the James River canal. The first vessel, the Governor McDowell, was an innovative craft featuring screw propellers that the inventor John Ericsson designed. It traveled fast enough that ripple currents of the wake produced dangerous erosion of the canal bank, and the ship was not commercially successful.

Deane sold his interest in the Tredegar Iron Company and by March 1845 had moved to Lynchburg, where he opened the Langhorne Foundry. That ironworks quickly achieved success by furnishing shot and shells to the navy during the Mexican War of 1846–1848. Deane helped secure the charter of the Lynchburg and Tennessee Railroad Company (soon renamed the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad Company) and supplied iron products for the line that linked eastern Virginia with Tennessee and other rail lines into the upper South. He served as an officer and stockholder in the railroad and also as a member of the board of directors of the James River and Kanawha Company. Deane helped found the Lynchburg and Abingdon Telegraph Company, incorporated in 1851 to maintain telegraph lines connecting Richmond, Abingdon, Farmville, Lynchburg, and intermediate towns.

In part because of his active promotion of improvements in transportation, Deane became prominent enough in the Whig Party to be chosen as a member of its state committee in 1839. He won election in 1853 to the first of three consecutive two-year terms in the House of Delegates representing Campbell County. During the 1853–1854 and 1855–1856 assemblies Deane served on the Committee of Roads and Internal Navigation and in the 1853–1854 session also on the Committee on Trade and Mechanic Arts. In the 1857–1858 session he served on the Committee on Banks. He sat on the board of trustees of Hampden-Sydney College for about a decade beginning in September 1839.

By manufacturing hundreds of railcars, railcar wheels, and castings primarily for the Virginia-Tennessee line, the Lynchburg ironworks paid off all its past debts. The company then became known as F. B. Deane Jr. & Sons. During the Civil War, the foundry manufactured shot and shell for the Confederate States Navy. It also received a contract to produce forty twelve-pound howitzers, which it may not have been able to complete. Deane again won election to the House of Delegates meeting in Richmond in 1863. In the two sessions that met in the autumn of 1863 and during the winter of 1863–1864 he served on the Committees on Banks and on Finance.

The foundry ceased operating in April 1865. Because Deane and his namesake son and principal partner, F. Browne Deane, had supplied war matériel for the Confederacy, and because both probably owned property worth more than $20,000, they applied for and in June 1865 received presidential pardons. In November 1866 Deane became the first president of the Lynchburg and Danville Railroad Company, chartered to construct a line between those two cities and which eventually became a central link in the Southern Railway Company. Francis Browne Deane declined reelection the following November and after a long period of failing health died in Lynchburg on 26 November 1868. It was fitting that a packet boat conveyed his remains down the James River canal to Cumberland County for burial in the family cemetery in Cartersville.

Sources Consulted:
Birth and marriage dates and smudged death date of 26 Nov. 1867 or 1868 in Deane family Bible records (1796–1971), Accession 27639, Library of Virginia (LVA); birth and death dates on gravestone transcribed in Mary Keller Franzee, "Deanery Cemetery" (typescript dated 13 Aug. 1936), p. 1, in Works Progress Administration, Virginia Historical Inventory, LVA; biography in S. Bassett French MS Biographical Sketches, with variant birth date of 26 Sept. 1796 and erroneous death date of 26 Nov. 1866, Personal Papers Collection, LVA; Goochland Co. Marriage Bonds (bond dated 3 Jan. 1827); some letters in Franklin Harper Elmore Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C., in Commissary Department, Virginia Department of Military Affairs Records, Record Group 46, LVA, and in Claiborne Family Papers (1803–1954) and other collections, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; Niles' Weekly Register 48 (1835): 364; Virginia Case Files for United States Pardons (1865–1867), United States Office of the Adjutant General, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Kathleen Bruce, Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era (1931); Alexander Crosby Brown, "The Canal Boat 'Governor McDowell': Virginia's Pioneer Iron Steamer," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74 (1966): 336–345 (portrait following 344); Douglas C. MacLeod,"The Iron Trade on the James River and Kanawha Canal, 1840–1865," The Tiller 15 (spring 1994): 6–10, 15; obituary with death date of 26 Nov. 1868, memorial tribute, and account of funeral in Lynchburg Daily Virginian, 28 Nov. 1868.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Douglas C. MacLeod.

How to cite this page:
Douglas C. MacLeod, "Francis Browne Deane (1796–1868)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2019 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Deane_Francis_Browne, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.