Edward Bumgardner

EDWARD BUMGARDNER, A. M., M. D., D. D. S., of Lawrence, has been a resident of Kansas for over thirty-five years. Though not a native, he is a loyal Kansan and deeply interested in its progress and standing among the states. He has read and studied with sympathy and understanding Kansas history, and his pride in the state's past and her institutions has prompted him so far as consistent with his professional work to assist in various public and semi-public undertakings.

Doctor Bumgardner is a native of Indiana, born in Warren County, April 10, 1865. His parents were Andrew and Sophia Elizabeth (Straight) Bumgardner. Four of their eight children are still living. Andrew Bumgardner was a farmer and during the Civil war held a lieutenant's commission from Governor Morton to raise a company of Home Guards. The Straights came from West Virginia and relatives of Doctor Bumgardner's mother were on both sides of the fratricidal strife of 1861-65.

In 1880 the family moved to a farm three miles north of Holton, Kansas. Andrew Bumgardner acquired a half section of unimproved land and undertook to make a farm from the land which he had received as nature had left it. The father succeeded in his ambition, lived out a prosperous career and died at Holton in 1912. His widow passed away there January 27, 1917.

Doctor Bumgardner, while a boy in Indiana, worked on the farm and attended district school. After coming to Kansas he was a pupil for a year in a country school and then in the Holton High School. In 1886 he graduated in the scientific course from Campbell University at Holton. For four years intermittently he taught school. In the fall of 1889 he entered the dental department of the Iowa State University at Iowa City, graduating D. D. S. in 1891. He began practice at Belleville, Kansas, but soon abandoned it to return to the Iowa State University as an instructor in the School of Dentistry. In the two years he was there he also completed his course in medicine and was graduated from the homeopathic department of the university in 1893.

In August, 1893, Doctor Bumgardner located at Lawrence, which city has been his home ever since. He was granted an honorary Master of Arts degree from Campbell University in 1894, his thesis being on the subject of heredity. It was the "first" and only A. M. degree ever granted by that school.

Doctor Bumgardner has never practiced medicine as a physician, though he keeps up his membership in medical organizations. One of his chief services has been in arousing physicians to the importance of considering oral conditions in their systemic treatment. He was a pioneer in the work for pure foods and drugs and was awarded a prize for a paper on this subject read before the Colorado State Medical Society in 1902. Doctor Bumgardner has served as president of the Homeopathic Medical Society of the State of Kansas, and as its secretary, and for three years was secretary of the Kansas State Dental Association and was elected president of the same association in 1910. For two years he was professor of metallurgy at the Western Dental College at Kansas City, Missouri.

His work in Lawrence has been in dentistry and he has written much on dental subjects for publication. Doctor Bumgardner has also written, not extensively but well, on a number of subjects pertaining to public affairs, often from the standpoint of his own profession and that of medicine. He is an active member of the Kansas State Historical Society and is now serving his third term as a director of that organization. Doctor Bumgardner is a Thirty-second Degree Scottish Rite Mason and a Knight Templar York Rite Mason. Politically, he is a progressive republican. For seven years he served as a member of the Lawrence Free Public Library Board, and for two terms was a member of the local board of education, and has seldom neglected an opportunity to work for the benefit of schools and education in his home community and in the state at large.

Doctor Bumgardner was married June 25, 1891, to Miss Jessie McCartney. Their married life, continuing through nearly a quarter of a century, was terminated in the death of Mrs. Bumgardner on October 6, 1915. The only child of this union, Harold, born February 14, 1895, died April 28, 1905. November 29, 1916, Doctor Bumgardner married Miss Edith Lua McCammon. Her father, George W. McCammon, who died in May, 1905, was a successful lawyer in Jefferson County, Kansas, and served two terms in the State Legislature. Doctor and Mrs. Bumgardner are members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME 1 & 2
BIOGRAPHIES — VOLUMES 3, 4, & 5
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