Sutter-Yuba County Biographies

MRS. MARY K. BUELL DEAN ADLOFF

Transcribed by: Kathy Sedler

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

 
            A successful rancher, living six miles north of Knights Landing, is 
Mrs. Mary K. Dean Adloff, who in girlhood was Mary K. Buell, the daughter of Dr. 
Elisha and Mary (Stafford) Buell.  Her father was a native of Baltimore, Md., 
while her mother came from Waynesboro, N. C.  Dr. Buell came to Marysville, 
Cal., by way of Panama, in 1849, and here practiced medicine.  He had attended 
one of the most celebrated medical schools in the United States, that in 
connection with the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and had also derived 
what he could from courses in the best medical school in Missouri.  In 
California, he was successful in discovering what was acknowledged to be a 
particularly fine remedy for malarial fever, and was called in for consultation 
by many doctors in both Yuba and Sutter Counties, and far up into the mining 
country, to treat fever cases.  Our subject often went on these errands of mercy 
with her father, so that she came to have a rather remarkable knowledge of this 
section of California.  In the latter part of his life, her father sought 
outdoor activity, and followed farming instead of medicine.  Dr. Buell died in 
1877, at the age of seventy-three, on the ranch where he had settled and made 
him home in 1867.   This place consisted of 133 1/3 acres six miles north of 
Knights Landing, and was originally a strip of Federal land and today Mrs. Dean 
Adloff holds the original patent, issued under the authority of Abraham 
Lincoln�s signature, which is affixed thereto.  Mrs. Buell�s first marriage 
united her with Green Riggins; and they had a family of seven children:  
William, Rebecca, Ellen, Loren, Sarah Jane, Angeline, Frank, and Henry Riggins.  
Green Riggins was a pioneer merchant who came from Laporte, Ind., to California 
about 1850.  He returned East and brought his wife and six children across the 
plains in 1852.
            Mary Buell attended the Marysville schools, and also the public 
schools of San Francisco, after which she enjoyed three years at Mills Seminary, 
finishing with a business course at Woodland.  Then she took up telegraphy, and 
thereafter served for three years as floor manager in the telegraph companies� 
office in San Francisco.  She was married the first time at Stockton, on April 
11, 1895, to Lucius Malcolm Dean, a native of Madison, Wis., and the son of 
Capt. Lucius and Mary (Malcolm) Dean, the former a Mississippi River captain 
well-known in his day.  L. Malcolm Dean had commenced his schooling in New York, 
and later had continued his studies in Nebraska; and after a while he came out 
to Oregon.  He was a newspaper man, and as a pioneer journalist he had 
newspapers in various parts of the West.  At one time, he worked on the Home 
Alliance of Woodland, and also on the newspaper at Esparto.  He died 
twenty-seven years ago, leaving a family of four children, Buell Elisha, at 
present farming on the old home place, and Elizabeth Buell being the only two 
now living.
            Mrs. Dean lived in Oakland for several years after her husband�s 
death; but she has recently come to live with her son, who is farming the old 
Buell ranch, devoted to general agriculture, with a small dairy of fifteen cows. 
 On December 6, 1921, Mrs. Dean married Charles Adloff, a native of Eau Claire, 
Wis., who follows the profession of a cook, being a master of the culinary art.
 
History of Yuba and Sutter Counties, Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, 1924
p . 1312-1313