Lewis Bushman was definitely his father’s son. Born in 1833 as the first child to George Andrew Bushman and Mary “Polly” Kepner, Lewis followed in his father’s footsteps in just about every way he could, and like his father, he would own a farm that the battle would make famous.

Lewis was just six years old when his mother died. His father did not remarry for 11 years. The records we have are silent on how Lewis lived during that time, whether he stayed with his father or lived with relatives or spent any time at the Alms House. Given how he lived his life, a good guess is that he was with his father the whole time and grew up working side by side with him from a very young age.

He was 16 when his father married Anna Wolf, and she became a permanent fixture at his home. But Lewis wouldn’t be in that home much longer—six years later, in 1856, he married Caroline Little in the Saint James Lutheran Church, the same place his father had married his mother. As it was with his father, Lewis’s occupation was farming . . . and selling his wares. Further, also like his father, he was in law enforcement, becoming the constable of Straban Township.

Just seven years into his marriage, war came to his farm. By that time, Lewis and Caroline had had and lost their firstborn, Harry Bushman, who died at age two in 1860. In 1861, they had George J. Bushman who was two at the time of the battle. (George would outlive his father but not his mother—he grew to be a cab driver who would be callously murdered by two local boys in 1918 for the change he had in his pockets.) The farm was on Sachs Road near George’s farm. Similar to his father’s farm, it was convenient to the Baltimore Pike; in Lewis’s case, their farm became the field hospital of the Union Fifth Corps on July 3 when its previous hospital and Jacob Weikert’s farm came under fire. The bodies of General Stephen Weed (U.S. Third Infantry Brigade, mortally wounded on Little Round Top) and Colonel Patrick O’Rorke (140th PA, mortally wounded on Little Round Top) were moved to Lewis’s farm and buried under an apple tree. Both bodies were marked by the burial party and then eventually retrieved by their respective families for burial in their hometowns.

Colonel Strong Vincent was also mortally wounded on Little Round Top; following his wounding, he was brought to Lewis’s farm where he was treated until his death on July 7. Caroline Bushman was pregnant at the time with another baby, and when that baby was born, she and Lewis named him Strong Vincent Bushman.

Beyond the battle, Lewis lived a colorful and notable life among Adams County residents. In 1864, he posted this notice in the local newspapers.

Robert D. Saylor was an 11-year-old boy living at the Adams County Alms House. The practice of bonding out children as labor to townspeople was common—that is, townspeople would take in a child for a small fee from the alms house, and they would put that child to work doing house or farm labor. Robert was likely in the Alms House because he was born into somewhat unusual circumstances: his father Frederick was 65 and his mother was 47 when he was born. Well, allegedly. That’s what the 1860 Census shows and what most genealogists have suggested. But living in the same home in the 1860 Census is Joseph Saylor, age 22 . . . apparently Robert’s brother. Joseph would marry Henrietta Lauver in the next decade and father a number of children, but we can’t rule out that Robert might have been the product of a relationship outside of wedlock, given the age of his parents, particularly his mother who had to be near the end of childbearing years, especially in that era.

Whatever the case, in the mid-1860s, the Saylor family either could not care for the boy or all had to go to the Alms House, and Robert was bound out to Lewis. Why would Lewis take in a child like this? Undoubtedly, he wanted the labor. But Lewis may also have recalled his own young days of growing up without a mother and learning the farming trade at the side of his father. Would he have sought to give that experience to another child?

Whatever Lewis’s intentions, it didn’t work out, though Robert’s life appeared to go okay thereafter. He eventually wound up in Knox, Illinois, where he married and had a large family.

Lewis also had his own conflicts with the locals. In 1870, one of the papers reported on a trial involving Lewis.

Newspapers obviously weren’t as concerned with the who, what, when, where, why, and how that is taught in high school journalism today, for we have almost no context here. This case likely relates to Civil War-era conscription (the draft) and how Cumberland Township met its required number of soldiers (“quota”) for the Union Army in 1864. During the war, each township was assigned a quota of men to enlist or be drafted. To meet these quotas, communities often took measures such as offering bounties (cash incentives) to volunteers or finding substitutes to serve in place of draftees. There are a few possibilities for what this case was about:

1. Bounty Payments or Substitutes – If the School Directors had a role in township finances, they may have been responsible for distributing funds to incentivize enlistment. Bushman may have been involved in a dispute over bounty payments—perhaps he was promised a payment for a substitute or for his own enlistment, and the township failed to provide it (or vice versa).
2. Exemptions from the Draft – Some individuals tried to avoid the draft by claiming exemptions (e.g., due to age, occupation, or disability). If Bushman was supposed to serve or provide a substitute but failed to do so, the township might have taken legal action against him.
3. Improper Filling of the Quota – If Bushman was involved in recruiting men for the quota (as a recruiter, employer, or local official), there may have been a dispute over whether he followed proper procedures. Perhaps he recruited men who were later deemed ineligible, or there was a disagreement over how the quota was counted.

Without more details, it’s difficult to say definitively, but the dispute almost certainly relates to how Cumberland Township met its obligation to supply soldiers during the Civil War.

Outside this, like his father, Lewis dropped off various farm goods for the newspapers to fawn over.

Similar notices appear in which Lewis had slaughtered 1500 pounds of hogs and so forth.

As Lewis grew older, the toll of farming must have become too much. He bought a small store near the Round Tops and began wholesaling products.

He was also a dealer of farm and lawn equipment, and he advertised in all the papers regularly.

On November 9, 1891, at the age of 58, Lewis passed away. The local historian called him “an industrious and faithful worker in whatever he undertook, and in business matters has been just and honest, sustaining himself honorably among his fellow-men, his word being as good as his note.”

HIs wife, Caroline, would far outlive him, though never remarry. She lived into her 90s and did not pass away until 1926. She spent the vast majority of her widowed life with her son, as her death notice testified.