In the story of William McLeod, we saw the importance of black man Moses, who was critical in bringing McLeod home. Another key figure in the story has not been mentioned yet. In 1863, Sarah Kime was 11 years old, the oldest daughter and second oldest child of Jacob and Sarah Bucher Kime. She had four younger siblings—two brothers and two sisters. As such, she was almost certainly an “old” 11 . . . a helper of her parents and likely a maternal figure among her younger siblings. Further, she had watched her older brother, Jesse, die just shy of age eight, leaving her the oldest living child in the family. When the war came to Gettysburg, the farm she lived on filled with Confederate troops, especially Georgians. As July 1 transpired, the farm filled with wounded, and Sarah found herself in a highly responsible position.

The Kime Family

In 1860 the Kime household in Straban Township (just north of Gettysburg) consisted of Jacob Kime (b. c.1828, of German Pennsylvania stock) and his wife Eliza (née Bucher), living on a roughly 200‑acre farm north of town. According to family tradition and later local histories, Jacob Kime leased his land from a neighbor (Joseph Bringman) and lived in a cabin with a large barn and several outbuildings together with his five children. By 1860 those children included Jesse Bucher (born 1849), Sarah Ellen (born 1851), John Albert (b. 1854), Simon C. (b. 1857) and baby Mary Jane (b. 1860), with an earlier son (Jesse Bucher Kime, b.1849) having died in childhood. Census records of 1860 (Straban Twp.) confirm Jacob (age ~32, farmer) and Eliza (31) with sons 9, 6, 3 and an infant daughter. The Kimes were firmly part of the Adams County farming community by mid-century – Jacob on his Table Rock Road farm and Eliza linked to the local Bucher family.

Kime Farm at the Battle of Gettysburg

On July 1, 1863, the open fields around the Kime farm saw heavy fighting as Confederate General John B. Gordon’s Georgians attacked the Union line on Barlow’s Knoll (Blocher’s). Union troops fell back across Rock Creek, leaving wounded Confederates behind. The Georgians established ad hoc field hospitals, and the Kime and neighboring Josiah Benner farms were both pressed into service as hospitals for Gordon’s brigade. According to wartime accounts and later histories, Major Peter Brenan of the 61st Georgia was among those carried off the field and taken into Jacob Kime’s house. Brenan had been a successful merchant in Georgia and had advanced quickly in the ranks. He had been leading his men forward when a Minié ball struck him in the head. He was conveyed to the farmhouse but succumbed there, dying either late on July 1 or the next day. He was initially buried under a peach tree on the Kime property before Georgia officers later exhumed and reinterred his body in Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia.

Sarah Kime and the Wounded Confederates

Jacob and Eliza’s daughter Sarah Ellen Kime (age 12 in 1863) became involved in caring for the wounded. According to family lore and the 1994 booklet That There Be No Stain Upon My Stones, Sarah carried water and aid to dying Confederates on the Kime farm. One account tells of Lieutenant Colonel William L. McLeod of the 38th Georgia: he had led a charge across Rock Creek and was struck in the temple by a Union bullet. Sarah found McLeod (only 21 years old) propped against the barn. She tended his wounds and later cradled him as he died. In his final hours, Sarah read aloud to him from a prayer book he carried (“Flowers of Piety”) – a book that her mother Eliza eventually returned to McLeod’s family after the war. Moses, McLeod’s body servant, buried the young officer beside the farmhouse peach orchard; his grave was also later marked in Georgia. These acts of compassion (two Confederate officers cared for on the Kime porch) illustrate the farm’s role as a temporary hospital during those chaotic first hours of Gettysburg.

Aftermath: The Kime Children

After the Civil War the surviving Kime children grew up in Gettysburg. Sarah Ellen (b.1851) married local farmer Francis Nicholas Frommeyer in October 1873 (the ceremony performed by Rev. William L. Pope). The couple settled in nearby Adams Township and had a large family – church records from the 1880s show multiple children of “Francis Frommeyer” with mother “Sarah Kime” (e.g. son Simon Augustus baptized May 1893). Sarah remained in Adams County for life; she died in 1924 and is buried (as Sarah E. Frommeyer) in Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg. Her husband Francis died in 1920.

The Kime sons also married and stayed in the community. John Albert Kime (b.1854) wed Lovina Witmor in 1877 and farmed in Straban; he died in 1931. Simon Cameron Kime (b.1857) married Cora P. Horner, who passed away young, then Emma Louisa Stock on August 23, 1887. Simon remained near Gettysburg as well and died in 1929. Daughter Mary Jane Kime (b.1860) did not marry and died in 1883 at age 22. The youngest daughters, Emma (b.1862), Catherine (b.1865), and Anne Eliza (b.1866), all married and moved out of the area (Emma and Anne Eliza to Illinois and Catherine to Crawford, PA). In sum, most of the Kime children reached adulthood in Adams County, and several were buried in the local Evergreen Cemetery, preserving the family’s presence in Gettysburg.

Community Standing and Legacy

The Kimes were farmers and active community members. The family’s conversion of their home into a battle hospital (and the subsequent burials) made the name “Kime” part of Gettysburg’s Civil War story, commemorated today by a historical marker at what is now Gettysburg Area High School. Although none of the Kimes became major political figures, they were interwoven into local civic life. Jacob’s wife Eliza was from another longtime Adams family (the Buchers), and Sarah’s marriage into the Frommeyer family further tied the Kimes into the county’s social network. Church records attest to this: several of Sarah (Kime) Frommeyer’s children were baptized at St. Francis Xavier Church in Gettysburg, and she is consistently listed as “Sarah Kime” in those Catholic records. In township records the family name (sometimes spelled “Keims”) appears alongside other landowners, and local historians have noted that the Kime farm was one of the few large rural properties east of Rock Creek.

Today preservation groups and battlefield historians regularly recount the Kimes’ tale as an example of Gettysburg civilian involvement. In the public-memory narrative, Sarah Kime is often highlighted as the 11‑year‑old who showed compassion to dying enemy soldiers – a human detail that personalizes the grand events of the battle. The Kime name still turns up in local genealogies and cemetery records, a reminder of the many Gettysburg farming families whose lives were forever changed by the war. In this way, the story of Jacob, Eliza and Sarah Kime bridges the civilian and combatant sides of the Gettysburg saga.