Pennsylvania has produced few true folk heroes, but one of the best known has a close association with Cumberland County. David Lewis, better known as Lewis the Robber, is the subject of an extensive legend to which have accrued numerous deeds and attributes of other outlaw folk heroes. In the case of Lewis the record was warped immediately after his death in 1820 by the publication of a spurious confession based on some known facts but filled with sufficient fantasy and distortion to confuse the picture of the Robber held by most people during the subsequent century and a half. However, the man behind the legend is the stuff of history not folklore, and several recently discovered documents have shed new light on that man.
Gladys Murray, librarian of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum, has traced Lewis's ancestry to the Dill family that founded Dillsburg. She recently acquired a handwritten transcript of the Bedford County trials of David Lewis for counterfeiting in 1816, a manuscript which Douglas MacNeal discussed at length in a series of articles in Centre County Heritage in 1987, and now Mrs. Murray has located Bellefonte court records that trace Lewis's whereabouts in 1812 and 1813.
Virtually nothing is known of the activities of David Lewis before the year 1812. Even the date and place of his birth are uncertain. The spurious confession states that he was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on 4 March 1790.1 However, at the time of his admission to the penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1816, he was listed as twenty-eight years old, indicating that he was born in 1788. Alfred Shoemaker once mentioned that " he was the son of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, and that he was outlawed through some act of youthful imprudence," 2 but there is no solid basis for this suggestion.
Most evidence suggests that Lewis was born in Centre County, as a contemporary writer says, "in Bald-Eagle Valley, on the banks of the Bald-Eagle Creek, about a half a mile below the Bald-Eagle Nest, and not quite, but nearly a mile from the spot where his body is now interred," 3 that is, in Milesburg. His father, Lewis Lewis, was an assistant surveyor in Centre County as early as 17744 and is listed in the 1787 assessment lists as a non-resident of Upper Bald Eagle Township.5 David was apparently the youngest of ten children (two of whom died in infancy) born to Lewis Lewis and his wife, Jane Dill Lewis.6 David's brothers Caleb and Thomas continued to live in that area after the Robber's death, suggesting that this was the real homeland of the Lewis family.
Of David Lewis's mother, several contradictory reports exist. One says that she was a native of Centre County, another that she was from Carlisle. Judge William H. Hall suggested that her maiden name was Drenning and that she was from Bedford County, but Gladys Murray, of the Centre County Library, after careful genealogical research, found that her name was indeed Jane Dill and that she subsequently married Frederick Leathers after the death of Lewis Lewis about 1790.7 Leathers died about 1796, though Hall says it was David's father who died that year. Jane Leathers lived long after 1795, Hall's date for her death. She became known in Centre County folklore as the legendary midwife Granny Leathers, about whom stories still circulate.8 Hall accepted as fact the Confession 's assertion that David Lewis served in Captain William Irvine's company of light artillery, though there is no evidence of such service.
However, there is evidence that Lewis had in fact deserted from the Army of the United States and fled to Canada sometime before the outbreak of the War of 1812. Imprisoned threatened with hanging there Lewis managed to escape when the jail was set on fire during the artillery bombardment from Fort Niagara, 16-21 November 1812. By 28 March 1813, Lewis was back in Centre County, already identified as an infamous character.9
The most significant extant documentary evidence of David Lewis dates only from 1815, when he was arrested in Bedford for passing counterfeit co in and bank notes, in company with three members of the Denning family.10 Local newspapers carried extensive accounts of the arrest:
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