The Jean Pierre Romaine Bureau Historical House, Est. 1811
Jean Pierre was a French-American settler, remembered as one of the founders of Gallipolis, Ohio. Bureau was born in March, 1770 at Beton-Bazoches in the French province of Île-de-France. He was in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution. He participated in the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, helping to demolish the inf
amous prison. Bureau arrived in Gallipolis in October, 1791. After a rocky start, Bureau eventually came to hold a series of positions of trust at Gallipolis, including postmaster general, justice of the peace, and clerk of the supreme and common pleas courts of Gallia County, which were established in 1803. He represented Gallia County in the Ohio Senate from the Seventh to the Tenth General Assemblies (1808–1811), and in the Ohio House of Representatives during the Fourteenth General Assembly (1815). He also surveyed land in both Ohio and Virginia. Bureau finished construction on his general store and home in 1811, located on the corner of 1st Avenue and State Street in Gallipolis. Jean Pierre Romain Bureau died in 1851, at the age of eighty-one, and is buried in the Pine Street Cemetery at Gallipolis. Bureau had two daughters, Madeline Romaine and Romaine Madeline, and became the father-in-law of both ten-term congressman Samuel Finley Vinton and Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician who built the first crematory in the United States.