On the morning of December 28, 1924, 87-year-old Nathaniel Butt was alone downstairs in a house on Baltimore Street in Gettysburg when he fell.

Harry Pfeffer, who was upstairs, heard the noise and came down to find Butt lying on the floor, unable to get up. Butt himself could not explain exactly how he had fallen. A doctor was called and found that he had fractured his right leg near the thigh.

The accident appeared in the next day’s Gettysburg Times under the blunt headline, “Nathaniel Butt Fractures Leg.”

For readers in 1924, Butt was simply an elderly Gettysburg resident and Civil War veteran who had suffered a serious fall. But there was considerably more behind that short newspaper item.

His life had taken him from a Cumberland Township farm into the Union Army, through some of the hardest fighting of the Civil War, back into his father’s household, into an Adams County criminal case involving a young woman and a daughter, west to Kansas for more than forty years, and eventually home again to Gettysburg.

A Gettysburg-area Soldier

Nathaniel was a son of Adam Butt and Nancy Bennett Butt, whose Cumberland Township property became entangled in the Battle of Gettysburg. The Butt farm and schoolhouse west-southwest of town were used in the enormous network of hospitals and burial sites created during and after the fighting. Nathaniel’s parents and siblings therefore experienced the war quite literally at home.

Nathaniel experienced it somewhere else.

The Star and Sentinel published a muster roll on September 2, 1862, listing the men of Captain John F. McCreary’s company. Among the privates appears “Nathaniel Butt, Cumberland.” The clipping also corrects an important gap in earlier research on Butt. He was by no means the only local man in the unit. McCreary himself was from Gettysburg, and the company included recruits from Gettysburg, Cumberland, Franklin, Straban, Liberty, Oxford, Hamiltonban and other parts of Adams County.

Among the names are familiar Gettysburg-area men including Peter Thorn, John G. Frey, Keller Culp, and Frank Wunderlich, along with several Kitzmillers and other local families.

McCreary’s company became Company B of the 138th Pennsylvania Infantry.

By the end of the war Butt had advanced. The 1865 muster-out roster lists Nathaniel Butt among the company’s corporals, alongside Peter Thorn and other men who had begun their service as privates.

The regiment’s timing produced one of the stranger circumstances of Nathaniel’s war.

When fighting erupted around his hometown on July 1, 1863, the 138th Pennsylvania was not at Gettysburg. The regiment had been serving around Baltimore and Harpers Ferry and was escorting stores toward Washington from July 1 through July 5. It did not rejoin its division until July 7 at Frederick, Maryland.

So while wounded soldiers were being carried onto or near his father’s property and the landscape Nathaniel knew was being transformed into a battlefield, he was away in uniform.

He would see plenty of fighting afterward.

The 138th participated in the Bristoe and Mine Run campaigns and then in the brutal sequence of 1864 battles that included the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor and Monocacy. It later fought at Opequon, Fisher’s Hill and Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley and ended the war in the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns. The regiment mustered out at Washington on June 23, 1865.

Nathaniel came home.

Back in his Father’s House

The 1870 census puts Nathaniel once again in Cumberland Township.

He was living in the household of his father, Adam Butt, then 59. Also there were Maria Butt, Jacob M. Butt, Sophia Bennet and Charles Wilton. The census recorded Nathaniel as 30, although later records place his birth around 1837 and describe him as 87 shortly before his death.

Whatever the discrepancy in age, the important point is clear: five years after leaving the army, Nathaniel Butt was back among his family in Adams County.

Then, in 1873, his name appeared in an entirely different kind of public record.

The Adams County Historical Society’s index to county criminal cases contains an entry dated September 18, 1873:

Nathaniel Butt — fornication and Bastardy — with Eliza Jane Pitzer, daughter resulted.

The index indicates that two case documents survive.

The woman was apparently Elizabeth Jane “Jennie” Pitzer, daughter of Emanuel Pitzer and Mary Ann Kauffman. She had been born October 23, 1851, making her 21 at the time of the court case. Years later, around 1885, she married Sylvester Barnard “Wesley” Aumen and lived in the Littlestown area. She died in 1918.

The 1873 court index gives us one tantalizing piece of information that has so far proved difficult to follow: a daughter was born from the relationship between Butt and Pitzer.

Her identity remains uncertain.

Later Aumen family material describes Jennie Pitzer and Sylvester Aumen as having no children, and Jennie’s 1918 obituary names her husband and numerous brothers and sisters but does not mention a surviving child. That does not erase the 1873 court record. The daughter might have died young, lived under the Pitzer name, been raised in another household, married and disappeared under a new surname, or simply been omitted from later accounts. Until the original bastardy papers or another contemporary record identifies her, anything more would be speculation.

But the sequence of events in Nathaniel’s life is striking.

West to Kansas

According to Nathaniel Butt’s Find a Grave memorial, he moved to Kansas in 1874—the year immediately following the Adams County bastardy case.

That timing does not prove why he left Pennsylvania. We have no letter, diary, or newspaper account saying Butt went west because of the case, and it would be irresponsible to claim that he did.

Still, the chronology is worth recording.

In September 1873, Nathaniel Butt was named in a fornication-and-bastardy case with Eliza Jane Pitzer, with the court index noting that a daughter had resulted. In 1874, Butt left Pennsylvania for Kansas.

He apparently remained in Kansas for decades.

Exactly what he did there remains less clear than we would like. By the time Gettysburg newspapers described him late in life, however, they associated him specifically with Abilene, Kansas.

The December 1924 account of his broken leg said Butt had come to Gettysburg from Abilene eight years earlier, or around 1916, to make his home with his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jacob Butt, who was also living in Harry Pfeffer’s Baltimore Street house.

If the 1874 date for his move west is correct, Nathaniel had spent roughly four decades away from Adams County before returning.

Home for the Last Time

Nathaniel’s December 1924 fall proved to be the beginning of the end.

He survived another two months, but on Saturday evening, February 28, 1925, he died at the Baltimore Street home. When the Gettysburg Times reported on his funeral on March 3, it said his death had been “hastened” by the fall the previous December.

His funeral was held from the house that afternoon.

The Rev. N. L. Horn of Trinity Reformed Church conducted the religious service. Members of Gettysburg’s Corporal Skelly Post of the Grand Army of the Republic then performed the GAR funeral ritual for one of their own.

Nathaniel Butt was buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery.

His life had come almost full circle.

He had grown up outside Gettysburg, enlisted with a company filled with Adams County men, and gone away to war. While his regiment missed the Battle of Gettysburg itself, his family home became part of its hospital and burial landscape. After the war he returned to his father’s household. Then came a relationship with Elizabeth Jane Pitzer, a daughter whose identity remains unresolved, and an Adams County bastardy case. Within a year Butt had moved west to Kansas.

More than forty years later, he returned.

And in 1925, nearly sixty years after he had come home from the Union Army the first time, Nathaniel Butt came home to Gettysburg for the last.