Stephen was the tenth of eleven children born to Zebulon Deane. He was also the first of two children born to Zebulon's second wife, Esther Millet. It is said that Stephen was educated at Kent's Hill. As a young single man, he taught in many Maine schools.

On May 1, 1844, Stephen married 17-year-old Elvira Pratt in Leeds. The couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Stephen set up a school for penmanship and commercial writing, which he ran in 1844 and 1845. Then Stephen took a job working as a clerk for his brother-in-law Nicholas Norcross, who owned a large lumber operation in Lowell. Stephen was employed there for about twelve years.

From the years 1845 and 1852, Stephen and Elvira had three children: Rosa, Henry Homer and Abbie. Henry died of dysentery a few months short of his second birthday.

By the 1855 Massachusetts census Stephen's widowed mother-in-law Abigail Pratt had gone to Massachusetts to live with Stephen's family. She was likely needed there, as Elvira had contracted tuberculosis. Less than a month after this census was taken, on October 12, 1855, Elvira died in Leeds at age 28. Abigail lived with Stephen's family until her death in 1864.

Stephen permanently returned to Maine after the death of his wife. On April 3, 1859 he remarried to Victoria Turner, and had four sons by her over the next decade.

While Stephen still lived in Massachusetts, in 1852, he purchased a farm on River Road in Leeds, two farms south of his father's farm. He rented it out however, and when he moved back to Maine he became a storekeeper at the North Turner Bridge. Later purchased the store built by Benjamin Millet in West Leeds, in the area known as "Slab City." Stephen ran the store, and was a postmaster there for about fifteen years. He was also a paymaster for a Lewiston mill. He moved his family permanently to the farm in 1874.

Stephen had a great interest in education, and served on the school committee for 9 years. He was also very interested horticulture, wrote poetry and did pen-and-ink calligraphic sketches. In the late 1860s he went to Cedar Rapids to visit his married daughter Rosa, and brought saplings back with him to plant in Maine.

In 1876, Stephen's daughter Rosa returned to Leeds for a visit, and while here she died of tuberculosis. Less than a year later Stephen's youngest son, seven-year-old Percy, died. In 1880 and 1884 Stephen's two grandsons through Rosa died, and were shipped back to Maine by train for burial with their mother. Stephen never quite recovered from these losses, and was depressed in his later years.

Stephen's sons took over the farm, and in the 1890s built the current set of buildings, now a large tan farmhouse with attached barn, about a mile south of this cemetery. Stephen lived to see the completion of the main house, though the barn was completed after his death.

At the time of his death, Stephen had just one surviving grandchild, Eliza Gilmore who was born in Iowa and then lived in Colorado. After Stephen's death, his only other grandchild, Stephen Russell Deane, was born and grew up on the Deane farm.

All of Stephen's children are buried in this graveyard, except for Stillman Howard Deane, who lived in Monmouth.