[2] In 1859 he entered Bowdoin College but left before completing his degree to join the Union Army when the American Civil War broke out in 1861.

He served in the 74th Regiment of Maine Volunteers as a captain but was invalided out due to a combined attack of typhoid and malaria in 1863.

In 1864 he married Mary Elizabeth Mann, with whom he had four children, Harriett (also known as Hattie), Edward, Thomas, and Grace, who went on to become a noted iris breeder.

The son from this second marriage, Robert Sturtevant, was a landscape architect who was close to his half-sister Grace and worked with her on plant breeding.

[1] During the course of his researches, Sturtevant amassed one of the most comprehensive American agricultural and botanical libraries of the day, one centered around some 500 pre-Linnean texts that were then comparatively rare in America.

[1][3] Over some thirty years, Sturtevant wrote hundreds of articles for various agricultural publications (both scientific and popular), often using the pen name of Zelco.

He was in demand as a speaker on the agricultural circuit, and he was active in various scientific associations, as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as a member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and as the first secretary and fourth president (elected 1887) of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science.

What became his posthumously edited and published Notes on Edible Plants (1919) was assembled from this manuscript together with material taken from reports issued by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station during his tenure, a series of articles in American Naturalist on garden vegetables, and more than 40,000 index cards of notes.