Jean Pierre Roman Bureau

Jean Pierre Romain Bureau, also known as John Peter Roman Bureau, Roman Bureau, J.P.R. Bureau, or simply P. Bureau, was a French-American settler, remembered as one of the founders of Gallipolis, Ohio and a member of the Ohio General Assembly. He was also 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.

Life Jean Pierre Romain Bureau was born in March, 1770 at Beton-Bazoches in the French province of Île-de-France. As a young man, he pursued the trade of a silk merchant at Rheims. 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 infamous prison.

Soon afterward, Bureau joined a group of settlers escaping the tumult of the Revolution, hoping to settle in the Northwest Territory of the newly independent United States.

Unable to find work at Gallipolis, Roman Bureau traveled upriver to Marietta. There he befriended Edward W. Tupper, the son of General Benjamin Tupper, with whom Bureau lived for some months. The following year, Bureau returned to Gallipolis, and served as commissary of the troops that had been raised to fight in the Northwest Indian War. In 1795, the Ohio Company agreed to sell the land to the colonists, and a further 25,200 acres was granted them by the United States in 1795 and 1798. He also surveyed land in both Ohio and Virginia.

Among Roman Bureau's namesakes was John Peter Roman Bureau Smith (1838–1911), for many years clerk of the county court in neighboring Mason County, West Virginia. Before the Civil War, Smith had been colonel of the 106th Regiment of Virginia Militia, and during the war he served in the Home Guard. He was deputy sheriff for eight years, and clerk of the county court from 1879 to 1908.

On the occasion of Gallipolis' centennial celebration, observed from October 16 to 19, 1890, a number of Roman Bureau's possessions were displayed as part of a relic room housing artifacts and belongings of the early settlers. Among other items, the collection included his chair, a snuff-box with a picture of the United States Constitution on its lid, and a picture of the Virgin Mary.