Cousin Luther’s 1891 Land Patent
In 1869, a 16-year-old Luther Davis Bushong ran away from home and embarked on an epic journey. From Virginia he ventured south via steamboat to New Orleans, and then west on a 1,000-mile cattle drive across the Great Plains and Colorado Rockies. From Raft River, Idaho, he continued west to Los Angeles, which he described as “a little Mexican town of not more, I am sure, than five hundred people.”
Luther Bushong’s 160-acre homestead is included on this undated map.
There’s no similar vivid record of Bushong’s time in the Pacific Northwest a decade or two later. An undated Homestead Tract map includes Farmer Bushong on 160 acres west of Appletree Cove. He, his wife Martha, and their five children (Edgar, Armer, Lettie, Silas and little Clarence) are recorded living in Port Gamble precinct in the 1889 Kitsap County census. That same year, Washington became a state, and Kingston town was platted during the next one.
On August 24, 1891, Bushong’s land claim was formally recognized by a government patent and announced in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer two months later. Although there’s no record of the Bushong’s Kingston homestead, patent approval typically required occupancy and “improvement” of the land.
The Bushong’s North Kitsap stay ended soon after. By 1893, marriage records show that eldest daughter Armer is in Texas. By 1900, wife Martha, and sons Silas and Clarence were all settled in Kerr County, Texas. Luther disappears from official records until October 1904, when he’s registered to vote in Gila County, Arizona Territory. Silas joins him there by 1908, eventually becoming a conductor on the Southern Pacific Railroad’s El Paso-San Francisco line.
Given Luther’s penchant for wild walkabouts, his 13-year absence from official records leaves much to the imagination. Eventually, he would join his wife and several children in Kerr County, where he died in 1942.
Today, 131 years after Bushong received his original land claim, a distant relative owns a piece of it. This curious coincidence behind Kingston House puts “family business” into perspective.
