Dean is named for the Dean family, whose cemetery is about a mile west. Samuel Dean came to South Carolina from Maryland in 1786 and settled here in the Mountain Creek area with the Cummins and James families. He and his wife Gwendolyn James raised a large family, and his descendants have lived here for more than two hundred years. A depot was built at Dean in 1886 by the Savannah Valley Railroad, later the Charleston and Western Carolina Railroad. By 1896, this rural community included the depot, a post office, several stores, a gristmill and saw mill, a blacksmith shop, a school, churches, and several residences.