AN EPILOGUE TO THE DAVIS FAMILY HISTORY
written in 1977 by Llewellyn Davis, son of John Yawger Davis and Mary Jane Russell
Children of Maplebrook: Charles Llewellyn Davis, Susanna Davis (Morse), Eliza Russell Davis, Jessie Dawes Davis, Isabel Catherine Davis, Mary Alice Davis (Polly), Jeremiah Russell Davis, Alexander Philip Davis, Llewellyn Howell Davis, William Frederick Russell Davis:
Even an epilogue may deserve an apology and mine is that I am the last of the family which came to Maplebrook in 1882 and left the old farm to others some fifty years later.
Father Time dictates that I should pass on to our next generation intimate facts concerning your parents or your uncles and aunts before it is too late. My beloved wife and I will soon celebrate our sixtieth wedding anniversary which may indeed be too late.
The dictionary describes the word ancestor thus: a man or woman cannot become an ancestor until he or she attained the status of great-grandparent. Some of us never did.
All the way up through four generations of our family in America there were few bachelors or old maids until the fifth which was that of my parents. Dad’s family consisted of four males and four females but one boy baby and one girl died at birth. Dad’s twin sister was the youngest in the family. Uncle Peter and Dad were the only ones who married. Peter had three children only one of whom married. They had no children so Peter’s descendents died then. The others of Dad’s family never married but Dad made up for that by rearing five boys and five girls.
He first met my mother at his Uncle John Yawger’s farm north of Port Byron. I do not know the date but she also was visiting her Aunt Ellen who was Uncle John’s wife. It was love at first sight and they were married on May 26, 1875. He brought her home to Cherry Hill Farm northwest of Auburn for the rest of the family had moved to Auburn in a house on Seymour St. Grandpa Llewellyn, after whom I was named, had died in 1870 and Dad gave up his course in Cornell to take over Cherry Hill Farm. How his 19 year old, city bred, child wife adapted to what was still almost pioneer life I do not know but before the next six years were over she had brought Charlie, Susie, Eliza and Jessie into the world.
Cherry Hill Farm is at the end of a long lane leading east from the main road NW of Auburn. I have seen it from a distance many times but have never visited there. Nor do I have any information about life there. But in the summer of 1882 when Jessie was still an infant, the family moved to Maplebrook Farm, two and a half miles northeast of Union Springs. The other six of us children were born there and it is from memories there that I shall try to recount as best I can the events in the lives of all ten of us children.
We of the twentieth century know what a depression is. The 1890’s were depression years too for I can remember my first winter days in district school when butter was a thing to sell and not to eat. Mother used to make my sandwiches with good clean lard. There were no snow plows in those days and Dad used to drag a great iron kettle upside down from the farm to Power’s Corners up one side of the road and back the other to clear the way for a sleigh to follow. I shall leave the events of the farm there and devote my efforts to biographies.
Charlie, the oldest in our family of ten children, was only six years old when Dad and Mother moved to Maplebrook. Life on a farm offered little more in the way of career than had the pioneer days. He had reached maturity by the time the unbelievable changes and opportunities entered the picture with the advent of the new century.
I think that in retrospect his life and mine were quite similar. We were not “jacks of all trades” but met opportunities as we came to them and made the best of them. He, like all the rest of us children, went to Powers Corners District School and on to advanced grades in Union Springs. In those days, the school building was a stone one with dressed blocks of limestone two feet thick for walls. I remember Charlie and Sue telling me years later of sitting up in the window openings to eat their lunch.
I am not at all sure if there was a high school in Union Springs in those days but I do know that Charlie went to the Quaker Seminary which was on the site of what is now Seventh Day Adventist School. It was a boarding school for Quaker children but day students from other than Quaker families were made welcome. He graduated from there with honors.
There were few labor saving devices on the farm in those days and Charlie was Dad’s right hand man. There was always a family man in the tenant house and others were hired during the harvest season. During threshing times all hands helped neighbors and they in turn reciprocated by helping thresh grain at Maple Brook.
I do not know that Charlie had many ambitions which were never realized. He was 22 years old at the time of the Spanish American War and many of his friends enlisted. Charlie wanted to go but was persuaded by Dad that he was needed more at home.
With the dawn of the twentieth century came the biggest change this country had ever seen. Buffalo celebrated by holding a Great Exhibition where President McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Charlie and Sue and many of their friends attended and had a wonderful time. I have often wondered what became of the magnificent Mexican sombrero which Charlie was wearing when he came home.
I think it was in 1902 or ‘03 that Charlie decided he would like to become a male nurse and went to Boston. Sometime later that summer he came home wearing a complete white duck uniform. I do not know what had happened but he never went back to Boston. If Isabel were living she could help me with a lot of answers.
Early in the century, after the great fire and after the new barn was built, Charlie was the victim of an accident which left him a cripple for the rest of his life. He was working on a scaffold some 20 feet above ground building a new silo. The scaffold gave way and Charlie was thrown to the ground breaking his pelvis and hip bones. We did not have the magic of present day surgery in those days and his limp and suffering remained with him the rest of his life.
In the summer of 1913 or ’14, Polly was in Auburn Hospital with a case of appendicitis. She contracted phlebitis or milk leg. She was brought home to recuperate and one of the nurses accompanied her to take care of her. Her name was Beulah Smith. She and Polly had been classmates in high school. We had not known her before but all learned to love her including Charlie. He and Beulah were married up on the Smith Farm near Number One on the 10th of June 1914.
In the years to come, Charlie had a variety of occupations with incomes sufficient to support his family and many places of residence, finally, buying a house in Port Byron where they lived until Beulah died. Their success in raising and educating a family of five daughters and two sons crowns anything that the rest of the family attained by college education, degrees or careers. The death of their son, Bruce, by cancer is but one of two deaths in the group of 25 first cousins in a span of 67 years.
Charlie was born March 12, 1876 and died October 23, 1962. Beulah was born December 10, 1887 and died March 23, 1958. They are buried side by side in the Port Byron Cemetery. Being a colonel in the US Army, Bruce is buried in a national cemetery in North Carolina.
So far, Charlie’s children have given him and Beulah 14 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren and 4 great-great grandchildren. So, he and Beulah are well entrenched as ancestors.
My sister, Susie or Susanna as she was christened, was the only one who had no middle name. She was fourteen years older than I and was a young lady long before I have any memory of her. Like all the rest of us, she went to Powers Corners District School and then to Union Springs High School.
My first real memory of her was when I started high school in Union Springs in January of 1906. She was perceptive and I can still recall what a struggle we both had trying to teach me first year Latin. Dates before that are still vague but I can still remember going down to a cottage on Hibiscus beach the summer after she graduated from Cortland Normal. There may have been two cottages for there was quite a group of young ladies and young men there – mostly classmates and a few local young men. The girls were all wearing heavy bloomers and waists and boys wore shorts and long sleeved light sweaters.
Charles Morse was among them for he and Sue were engaged. But he was going on to Yale for a degree and the wedding was planned for a later date. Dates are confusing before I went to high school but I can remember most of that whole crowd going to the Buffalo Exhibition and the summer when raffia hats were the vogue for young ladies. Susie and Jessie were masters at crocheting them in intricate flower designs for themselves and the other sisters. Those for the girls and white duck pants for the young men were quite the vogue.
I am not sure of the occasion but I think it was the announcement day for Susie’s engagement. Susie had made several dozen lovely cream puffs and had carefully placed them on trays up out of reach of hungry fingers. I don’t know where Jerry and Alex were but I couldn’t believe that just one of them would be missed so I climbed up on a chair and took one. Susie had counted them all right for later she saw at a glance that one was missing. That was the only time I can remember her turning me over her knee.
Plans had been made for the wedding in June of 1906, and Sue had chosen her wedding trousseau in a very swank women’s shop over in Auburn. I remember we were in school that day when got news that there had been a fire in Auburn and that the gown shop had been in it. It was unharmed however and she Charles M. were married as planned in the bay window of Maplebrook.
That fall they set up housekeeping in Shelton, Conn. where Charles was principal of the high school. Alex was with them for the next few years preparing to enter the Engineering College in Cornell with the Class of 1914. In either 1909 or 1910, Charles became superintendent of Gilbert Home for Children in Winstead, Conn. Their only child, Cornelia, was born there on March 15, 1913. I have a snapshot showing me holding her in my arms that summer in Winstead which I prize very much. I could go on from there but these annals are of her parents only.
Within the next few years they moved back to Auburn for I have another shapshot taken in the early spring of 1917 showing Cornelia all dressed in white standing looking up at me clad in my lieutenant’s uniform. The background was a brick house which stands at the NW corner of Park and North St. opposite Uncle Charlie’s house. Charles taught advanced subjects in the Auburn High School on North Street until his health gave out. They had moved to the East Genesee St. area by then and Susie took the position of principal of the Grant Avenue Grade Schools. Charles died in 1913 but Susie held that position until Cornelia had gone to Cornell Medical School and later received her M.D. degree as a Children’s Doctor in New York City.
While there, Cornelia met Hugh Alfred Carithers, another medical student and they were married on July 27, 1942. War was declared and Hugh was pressed into service as a medical officer stationed in the Embarkation Center of Newport News, VA. Susie gave up teaching joined the newlyweds there and lived the rest of her life as part of her daughter’s family.
Susanna Davis Morse was born December 31, 1876 and died October 8, 1967 just 55 days short of her ninetieth birthday. Charles was born May 30, 1873 and died March 22, 1930 at the age of 57 years. He and his younger brother, Clayton, had established a family plot in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn very close to the plot which holds three generations of Davises. Susie died in Jacksonville, Florida but was laid to rest beside her husband which is beside the old Davis plot.
Their only child, Cornelia Morse (Carithers), is the grandmother of three lovely children which definitely places Charles and Susanna in the ancestor category. She is definitely of the older generation now.
How I wish that Isabel were here to help me paint pictures of my older brothers and sisters for I have little memory of Eliza until we were together for a weekend in 1917 when I was on my way south to winter quarters in South Carolina. In those earlier years we at Maplebrook saw little of her for she was too busy taking care of others.
I have no exact dates but Eliza must have started in Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn as Susie was graduating from Cortland. It must have been about 1904 that she graduated as an R.N. to begin her career helping others most of the rest of her life. Her first work, which lasted several years, was charity nursing in the slums of New York with the desperately poor. Like many other chapters in her life, I do not know whom she worked for or who financed her. At one time she was in charge of a charitable hospital on the lower Hudson where expectant mothers from the slums were taken to give birth to their babies. How long she spent doing those things I do not know. In the first part of the century she seldom had a vacation and seldom got home to Maplebrook.
In 1917, I recall that she was in charge of a Children’s Hospital in Boston and that she took Fred there and had an operation performed on his left knee to restore its use with a lockable jointed brace. He and Jerry were victims of polio and Fred’s knee had become almost useless through the use of crutches. Soon after that she was sent by the Episcopal Church as a medical missionary to the Phillipine Islands working with the still uncivilized Igorote tribes in the northern provinces. Later she was in charge of the nurses in the Episcopal Hospital in Manilla.
In 1925, she married David S. Carll, a widower who lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. David’s first wife was a cousin of our mother whom David had married years before when he was working as a surveyor in Saugerties. In later years he had become president of the Street Railway System in Washington, D.C.
David died on November 6, 1927 and we five Davis boys set out for Washington the next morning for his funeral. It was election day when we reached there and I shall never forget seeing the display of searchlight beams against the sky announcing the election of President Hoover and the defeat of Alfred Smith. We five boys were bearers at David’s funeral the next day. After a few days, we returned home. Sometime later, David’s remains were exhumed and reburied in the Carll family plot in Huntington, Long Island, N.Y.
In the early thirties, after the election Roosevelt for President and the specter of creeping depression of that decade, Eliza and several of her other widow friends went to Europe where the cost of living was much lower. In 1935 when conditions had improved, she came home and bought a house on the east side of North Street, a couple of blocks below Uncle Charlie’s old home. Sue was a widow and Polly was homeless so they both came to live with her. It was a lovely home; and when Isabel’s husband, Bert, died in 1946, she also joined the others. Eliza had inherited a considerable income and was very liberal with the rest of us whose footsteps were slowly carrying us up the long slope from the depression days.
Meanwhile, Jerry and Mattie had left Maplebrook and moved to the old Courtney house on Depot St. in Union Springs. Dad and Mother had died. And, Fred was in nominal charge of the old farm, leasing it to whomever he could find to work it. The rental was not enough to keep ahead of the taxes and the farm was up for tax sale. Eliza came to the rescue and took possession of the farm until she finally found a buyer. Altogether, Maplebrook the farm which was known as the John Yawger Davis farm all over that part of the county was ours for well over half a century.
Polly was the first to leave the foursome on North Street when she married Clayton Morse, the younger brother of Charles Morse. Then in 1942, Susie also left to join Cornelia who had just married and was with her husband, Hugh Carithers, at Newport News, VA. Isabel remained with Eliza until the latter died on July 19th, 1948. Isabel, Gladys and I along with Clate and Polly accompanied her remains to Huntington, L.I. where she was laid to rest beside her husband, David Carll, in the old Carll plot.
Of all of us children, I think that Eliza followed her career closer than any of us ten children. From the moment she received her R.N. degree in Brooklyn in the early part of the century she was busy helping others for almost fifty years. We seldom saw her at Maplebrook which was for years the summer vacation spot for the rest of us. She was born at Cherry Hill Farm on October 7th, 1879 and died at the age of 69. Only three others of us had a shorter life span: Mary Alice died at 65; Mother died at 66; and, Fred died at 67
Eighty five years is a long time to remember even vital facts let alone trivial ones and it behooves future generations to make note of family happenings as they occur.
The fourth in our family was Jessie who was born at Cherry Hill Farm and just a babe in arms when she first saw Maplebrook. She was the musician in the family and think the only one who took piano or music lessons. She had a lovely voice and I can still hear it as she sang while playing on the old square piano.
After her graduation from high school in Union Springs, Jessie lived for a winter with Uncle Charles and the Aunties in Auburn while taking a course in shorthand and typing. I was too young to remember much about that so I do not know if she had a stenographers position or not. She, like all my sisters, had learned from Mother how to cook and keep house so she made a wonderful farmer’s wife when she married George V. Roberts the day after Christmas in 1906. Just as Susie had done, they were married in the bay window at Maplebrook.
George’s father was the youngest son of an English titled family and had been born there. His mother, I believe, was born in Ireland, also from a titled background. When George and Jessie were married, George was helping his father run a large modern dairy farm northwest of Port Byron. He took his new bride to a recently built, five room house near the old homestead. Their two children, Edward and Mary Jane were both born there.
Edward or Ted as we still call him was born in 1910 and is the oldest of the first cousins born to the Maplebrook children. Mary was born in 1914 and was the first of the 27 cousins to die 51 years later. She and Charlie’s second son died in a span of 67 years. Mary Jane and Fred’s daughter, Susan, are the only ones of the 29 who never married.
I do not know when George’s parents died or what became of the farm but when I came home from World War I, Jessie and George were on a farm east of the homestead. They later moved to Dad’s Uncle John Perrine Yawger’s place directly north of Port Byron.
Of all of us ten children, George and Jessie were the most unfortunate. I can recall those first years when they lived a stones throw from the homestead. George’s mother might be found in a darkened room singing gospel hymns to herself and bemoaning the fact that George’s older brother, Edward, had died in the Philippines in a typhoid epidemic. He was still a young man and Mrs. Robers had almost lost her sanity as a result. Such things are far from encouraging and must have been distressing to a bride.
The arrival of Jessie and George’s son, Edward, must have been a boon to her for he was a bouncing healthy baby. That was in 1910 and “Ted” is now 67 years old, the oldest of the 25 living first cousins.
And, then, four years later came the birth of their daughter, Mary Jane, who although a lovely healthy baby, was also a throwback of countless generations for she was a mongoloid baby. Physically she was a very normal child who in time was able to communicate in gutteral sounds to make her wants known. Jessie was a most affectionate mother and companion to Mary Jane but it gradually became a barrier between herself and George.
Somewhere, in the late twenties came the final devastating blow in Jessie’s life. I do not know if Ted was with them but Jessie and Mary had been to Port Byron in the family car when they met with an accident on the third rail crossing. They were thrown from the car by the impact. Mary Jane was not injured to any great extent but Jessie was badly injured by striking her head as she was thrown from the car. She lost the sight of one eye and suffered brain damage from which she never recovered. Recounting these facts which happen to a dear one so seldom still bring tears to my eyes.
There are many events in life beyond understanding but to me Jessie’s life reminds me of a quotation: “What hath God wrought?” I have no sons but to me, Jessie’s son, Edward, the oldest of my nephews and nieces, is as dear to me as a son of my own would be.
There is no stigma in the unfortunate things which happened in the lives of his father and mother and should hold his head high. For he in turn has presented them with three stalwart sons and they in turn with four grandchildren. The latter are the great-grandchildren which place George and Jessie in the category of ancestors.
Jessie was born on March 4, 1882 and died June 15, 1955. George was born April 28, 1881 and died on November 31, 1961. They are both buried in the family plot in Port Byron.
I hope that these condensed facts about his parents will induce my nephew, Edward, to carry on the vastly increased records of coming generations of the Davis family so that our descendents will know who is who.
Isabel was eight years older than I but of all my sisters she and I were close in those years after we had both married. I suppose it was because our children were so nearly of an age.
She, like Susie, had gone to Cortland and started teaching in Mamaroneck, Long Island. Later, she taught in Saugerties and in 1913 had gone back to Albany Teachers College to earn her degree so she could keep on teaching in the higher grades. She had roomed in the same house in Albany with Gladys Dobson and Marjorie Tuttle, two Canastota girls of whom I had never known.
In June of 1915, she and Alex met in Albany at graduation time for a reunion. Alex at the time was with the paper people in Glens Falls. Also at the Commencement was a young man named Birdsall S. Taber who hailed from Milton, N.Y. Bert, as we called him, had spent many summers at Maplebrook. He and Jerry had been in Oakwood Seminary together and later had roomed together in Ithaca where Bert was taking a course in law. Jerry was home with Dad still recovering from his polio handicap and Dad had induced him to take what was known as a short horn course in Cornell Ag College. Isabel had of course met Bert at Maplebrook during Christmas vacations and the friendship had ripened so he was at the party celebrating that 1915 graduation too.
I was helping Dad on the farm that summer and had been trading work with Wallace Schenck on the farm just east of ours helping thresh grain. I came back from helping there over the back lots and when I reached the kitchen porch was I surprised to see two strange girls there with Isabel. One was red-haired girl and the other a lovely brunette. The brunette was wearing white sailor suit or waist and skirt and with me it was love at first sight. I wasted no timed in hustling to the bathroom and getting garbed in white flannels and a silk shirt. It took three years and World War I to convince her that we were meant for each other. In the meantime, Isabel kept on with her teaching and Bert was in and out of Maplebrook during the summer months. Sometimes he would be helping with the farm and other times he worked as a trainman on the railroad running from Oswego to Syracuse. 1915 was the turning point in a lot of our lives.
Two years later Gladys was again at Maplebrook while I was there clad in a second lieutenants uniform. Alex also was there without a red-haired girl this time but with a brunette whom he had met up in Maine. The occasion was the wedding of Isabel and Bert out on the front lawn with little four-year-old Cornelia Morse as flower girl helped by two-year-old Naomi. The next day, Mother with her intuition, discovered that Alex and his friend from Maine were also newlyweds. He had been stationed in Rivermore Falls with the paper company and had fallen in love with Faye Eaton there. They had married two days before in Albany while on their way to the wedding.
The first years of married life for Isabel and Bert were spent in Poughkeepsie for I can recall coming back from France late in the spring of 1919; parading down Fifth Avenue in NYC as officer in charge of G Company; and, later that evening catching the first train for Poughkeepsie. Gladys had witnessed the parade but I had not spotted her in the stands. She was waiting that evening for me at Isabel’s house.
In 1920, Isabel and Bert moved back to Milton on the west bank of the Hudson almost opposite their first home. They had bought a beautiful old house which must have dated back to the Revolutionary days. As I recall, it was a double house with two dutch ovens in the basement kitchen. I believe that both Betty and Isabel, their two children, were born there. Anyway, Glad and I, with our girls used to spend a week or so after school was out visiting them. I still recall those visits for they were at the time of year when the Hudson River shad were running up the river to spawn and Isabel always had a sumptuous dinner of roe shad ready for us when we arrived. Those were the days of collegiate eight man crews racing on the Hudson. We always found a vantage point near the railroad bridge where we could spot the victorious crew. Bert had taken up the career of plumber in the little hamlet of Milton and its surrounding area which he pursued the rest of his life. As far as I know he had utterly forsaken the law which he had tried so hard to master back in Cornell. Our two families I think were closer than any other two from Maplebrook for our children were about the same age and the week or more visits both ways lasted all through their teens.
Bert died of cancer in 1946, ten days before their first granddaughter was born. She was Betty’s daughter, Dawn Wynant. She, too, has a son now which makes Isabel and Bert ancestors in their own right.
Isabel came to live with Eliza in Auburn until Eliza’s death in 1948. Then she went to live with Betty in a suburb of Albany. When Polly’s husband, Clayton, died a year later, Isabel moved in with Polly in the little hamlet of Navarino, south of Syracuse. Two years later, Polly had died of cancer. Isabel then went to live with Isabel Gassoo over in Berlin, N.Y. Meanwhile, Betty’s husband, Bill Wynant, had died. Betty married a second time to Emile Relle. Isabel was living with the latter couple near Hudson, NY when she was taken sick and died in the Hudson hospital two years ago.
Isabel was the only one who married a man younger than she and she outlived him by 29 years. Isabel was born March 22, 1884 and Bert’s date was December 15, 1889. Bert’s death was July 30, 1946 and Isabel died on August 5, 1975. Bert was a birthright Quaker and they were laid side by side two years ago in the Tabor family cemetery in Milton, NY. I am the last of the Maplebrook brothers and sisters and it was a heartbreaking occasion when Gladys and I stood beside their graves two years ago, a long stones throw from the old house where they had lived when our children were small.
Isabel lived the longest of any of the Maplebrook family. She lived 91 years, 4 months and 14 days. Susie lacked one year, two months and 23 days of that figure. Charlie was next with 86 years, 7 months and 11 days.
Isabel was christened Isabel Catherine Davis after Dad’s twin sister Isabel Catherine. And, her husband, Bert’s real name was Soloman Birdsall Taber. But, few people knew that as he was always called Bert. His father’s name was Soloman Birdsall, Sr. and so, Bert was a Jr.
I do not know whom that name came from for I find no Alice in our index of names. Anyway, we folks at Maplebrook seldom called her by her real name but by just plain Polly. Where that nickname came from I do not know unless it was from my great-grandmother Polly Thompson Davis.
My early remembrance of Polly was when I was the littlest of the flock before Fred was born. In those days, all of the family that was home would attend the old Presbyterian Church in Union Springs in the morning. In the spring or summer, the only unusual project allowable was a visit to either Winn Pearson’s Gully south of us or the O’Connell Gully just below where Ralph Davis lives above Crane Cemetery. In memory, I can still see Polly getting us three younger boys organized to go after wild flowers; and, can still hear her admonishing me, as the smallest who lagged behind, with the warning, “Come on you old cow’s tail!”
Polly, Fred and I spent more time on the farm with Dad and Mother than any of the others and over the years she was Mother’s right hand for more of her life than any of us. She, like the rest of us, graduated from the old District School and Union Springs High School. It wasn’t until later in life, however, that she felt the need of a career and went to Rochester where she took a course in cafeteria management at Rochester Institute.
I have been trying hard to reconstruct these happenings by dates but memory is a tricky thing sometimes. Working backward, I have been able to straighten out several happenings. Starting with the date when Charlie and Beulah were married (June 10, 1914), I am able to place the time when Polly came home from Auburn Hospital after an operation. She had been there for an appendix operation and had brought a trained nurse with her for she had developed phlebitis or milk leg while there. The nurse was an old schoolmate named Beulah Smith whose parents lived on a farm east of Maplebrook near Number One, a small hamlet near Fleming.
Memory brings back the whole picture of Polly’s homecoming in the middle of summer and her convalescence in the big south bedroom upstairs at Maplebrook. That was in 1913 for I can recall clearly how Bert and I had been to Auburn in a sulky or two–wheeled cart and had stopped at the city dog pound. We had no watchdog at Maplebrook and that is how we found “Sputtie”, a lively, white English Terrier with only one distinguishing mark – a brown left ear. He had been bitten by another dog somewhere along the way and was rather subdued and timid when we first hoisted him aboard the sulky. But, by the time we reached Maplebrook, he had accepted us as old friends. We took him up to see Polly later and he proved to her how delighted he was by dashing under her bed and out the other side around and around.
Jerry and Mattie were living on Uncle Charlie’s farm across from the Patterson farm since their marriage in 1912. But, since Dad needed help on the farm, they moved back to Maplebrook in 1915, living downstairs while Dad and Mother lived upstairs. Polly, in the meantime, had gone to Rochester where she took a course at Rochester Institute of Technology in cafeteria management. As I recall it, she lived with Mrs. Harriett Bridgeman, whose daughter Janet became Fred’s wife in 1925. Her first job was with Gleason Gear Works where she managed the plant cafeteria.
By 1919, Polly had moved back to Auburn where I believe she had a hand in organizing and planning the new “Women’s Union” lunch room on South Street. Along with that, she and Mrs. Romig had a thriving business home canning all sorts of vegetables and fruit in glass jars. Mrs. Romig was the grandmother of Henry Romig who later married Marjorie Davis Wetherby’s daughter, Gail Ann.
Because of Mother’s failing health, Polly gave up all the enterprises she had been overseeing and convinced our parents to move to Auburn where she had an apartment on Bostwick Ave. which was very near to where Glad and I were living on Westlake. They spent the winter there with Polly. Along in May, Mother was taken with a severe heart attack. I was in Crouse Irving Hospital in Syracuse recovering from a duodenal ulcer but was allowed to come back to Auburn the night before she died. It was just eleven days before her 66th birthday (May 22, 1922).
Aunt Cornelia, the mainstay of Uncle Charlie’s household, had died four years before so Polly and Dad were induced to come live at 154 North Street. Both Dad and Aunt Mary passed away the following year. But, in the meantime, Fred had finished his last course at Cornell and had come to 154 North St. to live. Uncle Charles died in 1925 and Fred married Janet Bridgeman the following year. To settle Uncle Charlie’s estate, a value was placed on all the articles of furniture, etc. in the house and each of us nieces and nephews in turn was given a choice of what was left.
Finally, the house was closed and eventually sold. In the meantime, Polly went down the Hudson to live with Bert and Isabel where Polly assisted in taking in overnight tourists for several years. She finally came back to Auburn to join Eliza in her new home farther down North St. after Eliza had spent two or three years on the continent to avoid the depression years of Roosevelt’s early administration. In 1936, Polly and Clayton Morse were married and went first to live on the Falls Road just north of Cazenovia. Later, they moved to Deruyter; and, finally to Navarino on the Cherry Valley Highway.
Clayton was born April 4, 1875 and died in Navarino on February 22, 1949. Isabel went to live with Polly until Polly died of internal cancer two years later on April 21, 1951. She was born on February 23, 1886. They were both laid to rest beside Charles M. and Susie in the plot in Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn, NY.
Jerry was only four years older than me but strangely I have very little recollection of him or of Alex prior to 1905. My lone memory bears little weight as to what either of them looked like. But etched clearly in my mind after seventy odd years is the front porch of the old house with a woven wire fence running along the west side of the garden. On the front porch steps I can see clearly the figure of a giant of a man with a sailor’s straw hat on his head. It is our first cousin, Robert Davis, from Coffeyville, Kansas. I do not know what I had done that Jerry and Alex were resented but the picture is clear of each of them with a stick in his hand taking a swing at my bare legs as they ran by. Tears were running down my face and I was repeating over and over, “Well, what did he do it for?” Picture that as you may, yet I have no answer for it. The sight of a man well over six feet in height in those days was a rare thing. Today it’s not uncommon to see them closer to seven feet, all of which is credited to diet.
The year 1905 comes back clearly for that is the year I was allowed to go camping with Jerry and several of his friends, Jay Schenck, Dan Wheeler, Ray Shoemaker, and above all Doug Smith who lived at Farley’s Point and was the owner of an out-sized wall tent. I recall little of the camping itself but the tent itself was a rare thing. It was pegged on the upper slope of the sandy beach on the south side of the mouth of Dills Creek which is a smaller creek just south of the Great Gully Creek. It was the last sandy beach between there and Ithaca for most of the shoreline beyond was shale ledges dropping into deeper water.
The one thing which stands clear in my mind is of Jerry being helped into our democrat wagon one morning and my riding home with him. He was quite helpless and had to be helped in and out of the wagon. It was some time after we got him home that Dr. McCully came from Union Springs. He finally diagnosed Jerry’s condition as infantile paralysis which later was given the name of poliomyelitis. Fred was the only other one of our family who contracted the disease. Both of Jerry’s legs were affected which was a lucky thing in a way. For although they were pretty spindling the rest of his life, the joints were not affected too much so he was able to regain the use of both legs. Fred, however, had it in his left leg and went for years with crutches which in time caused the knee joint to ossify. Eugene Daley, a neighbor boy, was afflicted in both legs and was able for several years to creep around only on all fours. What miracles this century has brought about. Before that time, polio was just a passing word. But, in due time, it along with tuberculosis and many other contagious diseases were eliminated from the picture.
A year later, we were startled one afternoon to see a great column of smoke rising miles away in the southwest. It was the tragic burning of the old sidewheeler Frontenac which plied between Cayuga and Ithaca. She had somehow caught fire and had been run ashore at the exact spot where we had camped the year before. She had grounded well offshore with a heavy west wind blowing. Many who jumped overboard were drowned in the heavy waves. I don’t suppose there is any sign of the wreck now but for years the gaunt skeleton of the metal parts of the old boat stood as a reminder of that tragic day. It may seem strange to have this account in the introduction to Jerry’s life but memory must be served picture by picture.
One thing which has held in my memory of those days is the picture of Jerry sitting in a straight chair and exercising his feet and legs on the pedal plate of Mother’s sewing machine. Jerry was seventeen years old when those things happened. He had gone to high school two years but that fall after regaining some strength he switched to Oakwood Seminary where he became acquainted with Bert Taber, who later married Isabel. That was fortunate because for the next few years Bert was Jerry’s right hand man. Jerry was a year older than Bert but I believe they both graduated from the Seminary about the same time. Bert started a law course in Cornell. Jerry recovered enough so that he too went that fall to Cornell taking what was known as a “short horn” course in Agriculture. That was the start of a lifelong friendship between them for Bert was Jerry’s “right hand man” from there on. That winter Uncle Charlie took Jerry to Asheville, North Carolina where it was mild enough for Jerry to regain a lot of his strength. He was able to be a great help on the farm from there on.
Those were the days of “Surprise Parties” when whole families packed up their dinners and joined others in dropping in on neighbors without warning for an evenings entertainment and midnight supper. Our cousin, Bill Patterson, was courting his future bride, Edith Hall, who lived at Half Acre. Jerry and Polly somehow got in on a “Surprise Party” for the Halls. And, that is where Jerry met his future bride, Mattie Webster, whose family lived on a farm north of the Halls.
Late in February 1912, Alex, his roommate, Al Everett and I started out from Ithaca on skates. The old lake had frozen the whole length and we were determined to skate the thirty odd miles to Union Springs. Air holes in the ice, however, forced us to detour a good many times from one shore to the other to avoid them. So, it was pretty dark when we reached Levanna. There we caught the evening train for Union Springs where we were met. I must have been completely exhausted for I came down with a combined attack of jaundice and tonsillitis. I was abed for nearly two weeks but had recovered enough to go with Dad and Mother and Fred by sleigh to Union Springs and by the Lehigh Valley railroad to Auburn. In Auburn, we boarded a two horse sleigh cab and went to Mattie’s brother, Ben Webster’s home out on Clark Street Road. There, Mattie and Jerry were married on the sixth of March, 1912.
When spring came, Jerry and Mattie set up housekeeping in the old Shannon Davis farmhouse opposite the Patterson Farm on Town Line Road. It was one of two farms which Uncle Charlie owned and I think he let them have it on very liberal terms. They lived there until the spring of 1916 when they moved to Maplebrook. Their four girls were born there, bringing the number of Davis babies born there to ten. Dad and Mother moved upstairs where they used part of the rooms as an apartment. Polly had been sticking pretty close to Dad and Mother all those years but now found the chance to start out on her own when she entered Rochester Institute of Technology in 1915.
Farming had been simplified by motorized equipment after World War I so that Jerry had made out pretty well. The barns, however, were again completely destroyed by fire as they had been before caused by a lightning bolt in 1925. Jerry replaced them by larger and more modern buildings. In 1927, Jerry decided to leave the farm as it had become much too hard for him to continue farming . He moved his family to the old Courtney House on Depot Street in Union Springs.
The old school house of the early 1900’s had been replaced by a large consolidated school north of the village and Jerry was given the job of school bus driver in the north area as far away as Bluefield Road outside of Auburn. Many high schoolers will remember what a careful driver he was in those days. Driving school bus proved rather strenuous and Jerry found a better paying and easier job with the Beacon Milling Co. in Cayuga to which he rode back and forth with a neighbor.
For the first time since my Grandfather Llewellyn had been a trustee on the town board, Jerry followed his example. Jerry was interested in politics and served several terms on the Springport Town Board. Dad was a Republican but he shunned public office. Jerry, however, did carry on the family tradition by taking Dad’s place as elder of the Presbyterian Church, a duty which had been held by his grandfather and father since 1825 or 1826 when the church was built. In 1926, Janet, the oldest daughter of Jerry and Mattie, was a candle bearer in the centennial celebration of that event.
All four of Jerry’s daughters married fine young men and by 1965, he and Mattie had twelve grandchildren. They eventually had 29 great-grandchildren thus qualifying them as ancestors.
Jerry was born on April 16, 1888 and Mattie was born on March 6, 1891. Jerry died May 31, 1965 and Mattie died on September 20, 1976. They are buried in their family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Union Springs, NY.
Like all the rest of us at Maplebrook, Alex went to District School and then a year at the high school in Union Springs. Sue’s husband, Charles M, was principal of the school in Shelton, Connecticut and Alex lived with them and went to that high school for two years. His fourth year was at Oakwood Seminary to clear his entrance requirements to Cornell. Then, he took the state scholarship exam which he passed giving him free tuition for a four year mechanical engineering course.
Alex was two years older than I so I can remember more of our boyhood together than with any of the others. He was much more progressive than any of us in the matter of earning spending money doing such things as peddling bluing to the neighbors or hunting for duck eggs in the creek nests and hatching them under setting hens. I can remember that project for he had a dozen or more ducks that fall when the barn burned. He had fixed a pen for them under the plank driveway leading on to the main floor of the barn. And, that was the only remains of the barn the next morning. He realized quite a bit from selling them that winter.
When he graduated from Cornell in June of 1914, he already had a position assured with a paper company in Glens Falls, New York. And, like Eliza, were more or less out of touch with him in the years to come. His whole life was given over to some phase of paper making so he seldom got back to Maplebrook. Unlike us other four boys, Alex had a sizeable salary the rest of his busy life. Charlie, Jerry and Fred were handicapped but I had no excuse and was to become more or less a “jack of all trades”.
In 1917, Alex was still in Glens Falls but came home the night of July the Fourth for Isabel and Bert’s wedding. With him was a young lady whom he had met in Livermore Falls, Maine. Her name was Faye Eaton. After the new bride and groom had left for their honeymoon, Mother learned the truth from them. Alex had been doing work at the paper mill in Livermore Falls and had gotten acquainted with Faye there. They had stopped in Albany on the Fourth of July and had been married before coming on to Maplebrook.
Long after World War I, Alex and I were together and something was said about a little lake over in Belgium known as Dickibush Lake. Ales was surprised and asked where I had heard that name. It turned out that he had been commissioned a First Lieutenant in the Air Corps and had spent most of the war down in Texas training pilots as aerial observers. They had used aerial photographs of Dickibush for practice maneuvers. My first taste of front line duty was when we went into the front line in the Dickibush sector.
Alex and Faye lived in Glens Falls until after the war and their only daughter, Erna, was born there in 1919. Alex was later assigned to other plants but most of his engineering work was with the plant in Bucksport, Maine where one of the finest newsprint plants was located. Even after he retired in the late fifties, he was retained as a consultant.
Alex and Faye had four grandchildren, one of whom has married (as of this writing) and has a son, Daniel. So, they too have qualified as ancestors.
Alex was born January 27, 1890 and died February 22, 1972. Faye was born August 26, 1895 and died January 2, 1975. They are interred in the cemetery just east of Bucksport, Maine.
After three quarters of a century, I feel pretty small and alone groping in my memory for events and facts about my brothers and sisters for Gladys and I are the last of that group of husbands and wives. All the others are gone. Father Time has directed my footsteps toward my exit too but I am determined to wait in the wings until I have presented to the next generation of first cousins a thumbnail sketch of who and what your parents and aunts and uncles were. It’s a regrettable thing but my memory serves no great purpose regarding those years before the turn of the century. I could write all day about happenings since 1900.
Like all the others, I went to Powers Corners District School, too. I played Ante Over with a makeshift ball, heaving it over the peak of the building to the team on the other side. I still recall holding up my hand for the teacher’s permission to get a drink of water at the water pail and other things. Eight grades in one single room was a miracle for those of us in the three lower grades digested what was being recited by the other five in the front of the room. We were more interested in what they said than with our own ABC’s. But there are other things than school.
I still relive those days when Alex and I built a flabby canvas canoe with basket handle ribs and the miracle of our riding the flooded creek current in it.
By 1905, I was about the last of the Davises except Fred in the old district school. And, I can recall Wynn Pearson, the trustee, visiting school and announcing that there would be a “magic lantern” program the following Saturday evening. I don’t recall what the slides were about but I can still see myself carrying a lighted lantern while it was still light and hiking the quarter mile to school.
Rural Free Delivery started in 1902 so from then on we had a daily paper for Dad to enjoy. Whether he read to us or whether I was able to follow the news myself, I do not recall. But the others called me “old news bag”. And, when I reported to everybody the news of the famous Simon Boliver carving our republics in South America, I soon got the nickname of Bolivar or just plain old “Bol” which still clings to me when I visit Cayuga County.
I was the only one in high school from January 1907 to June of 1910 when I graduated. I was Salutatorian for the class for the only other person who graduated was the older Hurtcorn girl with a few higher marks than I had. She was the Valedictorian.
Alex entered Cornell that fall, but I still lacked the required regents to enter and instead went to Oakwood Seminary that fall. It was a boarding school but had quite a few day students. A foreign language was required for college entrance so I took a course in German for which I was more than glad years later when one of my duties in World War I was interviewing German prisoners before sending them to the rear. Most of that year in Oakwood I went across lots on foot rather than drive a horse which sure was good exercise and I learned a lot about farm land between the farm and Union Springs.
I entered Cornell the following fall. Following in the footsteps of Alex, I entered the mechanical engineering course. To my downfall, I had to take a course in chemistry
which was a course that our high school had never had. Of course, I flunked it. The next fall I decided engineering was out of the question. Instead, I stayed home to help Dad until the fall of 1913 when I again went back to Cornell as an ag student.
That year on the farm taught me a lot of things. I plowed a twenty-acre meadow on the west side of the road with a three horse team and a 15” furrow walking plow. Over a weekend I figured how far I had walked doing that. It was in the neighborhood of 130 miles. One of the Warrick boys with his family was living in the tenant house and helping on the farm that year so altogether we managed the old farm pretty well. Jerry and Mattie were on Uncle Charlie’s farm near Oakwood but he had more modern tools, such as riding plows, etc., so he managed very well too.
I was back at Maplebrook in 1914 and 1915 when I met the girl who was to become my life mate, Gladys Elizabeth Dobson, who had lived in the same house in Albany with Isabel when she was there to get her master’s degree. I had never heard of her before nor of the place where she lived which was Canastota, some twenty miles east of Syracuse. She and another Canastota girl, Marjorie Tuttle, had just graduated from Albany State Teachers College and were visiting Isabel for a week. It was love at first sight but it was almost three years before the most eventful day of my life took place. I saw little of her for the next two years for she had a position in Erie, Pa. teaching home economics and that was a long ways from Canastota. I left the farm that winter and worked for a while in a garage in Auburn run by Lew Springer, the Overland man from whom Dad had bought a two-seated car. I moved on to Buffalo where I had a job until January in an aeroplane factory. But to this day, I cannot tell what plane it was. Then, I went to Toledo, Ohio and the Overland factory where I worked the rest of the winter on the assembly line. While there, I roomed with a boy from Vermont in the Y.M.C.A.
Poncho Villa was throwing his weight around down in Mexico and General Pershing was recruiting an army to calm him down. My roommate and I decided to join the regular army. We went so far as to report at the armory where we had a physical examination and were to be sworn in the next morning. We both got cold feet however and I woke early the next morning to find my roommate had gone; leaving a note that he was headed for home. Anyways, I followed suit and caught the first train home too.
I talked things over with Uncle Charles that summer and we both decided my best course was to enter Oswego Normal that fall and get a teacher’s diploma to teach manual training. I did just that and soon found that at last I had chosen the right vocation. There were some dozen of us young fellows who were seniors that next spring. And, when war was declared on the Kaiser on April 6th, 1917, we all decided to either go to Officers Training School or to enlist. That night we talked it over with the local state assemblyman who told us the applicants for that were already swamped. So, I left the next morning, bag and baggage for Auburn where I went at once to the armory. Co M, 3rd Regiment of the National Guard had been stationed there but had already moved up to Fort Niagara on the mouth of the Niagara River to guard the border. I was, however, given a few days to visit home which I did.
We were at Fort Niagara until July when we were relieved and given a two week furlough before being moved to a northern suburb of New York City. That worked out all right for me because Isabel and Bert were married on the fifth of July and Gladys also was there. After that July furlough, the company was increased in size by additions from the old 74th in Buffalo and from the 12th in New York. In due time, we left the Pelham Bay bivouac; and, the whole division marched down Fifth Ave.. We then transported by ferry to New Jersey to entrain (go by train) for winter training in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Early in May (of the following year) we entrained for Newport News (VA) where we were to board transports for France. Two days after arriving there, I received a wire from Gladys for me to make arrangements as she would be arriving sometime on Saturday. I finally got in touch with her over in Norfolk where she had missed the last ferry. I had tried to get a marriage license the day before but the city clerk explained that it was a Virginia law that the bride must be present with the groom before one could be issued. I found out where he lived so the next morning when Gladys arrived, I took her over to meet him but he would not issue a license on the Sabbath. I had no trouble getting it the next morning, however, and we were married the next morning about ten o’clock by the Rev. Hal Boswell in the Presbyterian Church study. We had four nights together but on Friday the word came that we were to embark the next morning. Gladys wasn’t the only bride or sweetheart so although we were confined to the Embarkation Center, the girls were allowed to visit us for last farewells.
It was nearly a year later that we returned to New York marching triumphantly back up Fifth Avenue. In late evening of that same day, I was rejoined by Gladys up in Poughkeepsie where she was staying with Isabel and Bert. We didn’t waste much time getting back to central New York; remaining in Canastota till the fall when we moved up to Auburn and rented the downstairs apartment on the south side of Woodlawn Avenue. Our oldest daughter, Jean, was born in Crouse Irving Hospital in Syracuse on Columbus Day of 1920. Dad and Mother moved to Auburn that same year living near us on Bostwick Ave.
I had several jobs while living in Auburn – International Harvester; Columbian Rope; and, finally, the Dairyman’s League.
In 1922, I was bothered with intestinal trouble and was sent to Brooklyn Naval Hospital for an examination. I finally landed back in Crouse Irving where they operated on my duodenal ulcer and removed my appendix. It was there while recovering from the operation that Mother was stricken with severe heart attacks. I was hardly fit for traveling but did make it back to her bedside the night before she died on May 22, just ten days after her 66th birthday. Three days later, Mother was laid in the old Davis family plot in Fort Hill Cemetery.
Not too long after that we moved to a house belonging to Judge Mosher on East Genesee St. It needed renovation and considerable repair. Fred came to live with us and had a lot of fun that winter getting it back in shape. Things were changing however in Canastota. So in 1925, we moved back there. Dad Dobson was building a new house at Quality Hill which Dave and I helped finish while we took turns with the molders tool business. David and his family moved to Utica that fall and we moved into Aunt Eva Woodcock’s house instead. Dad ran his gas station at Quality Hill and I managed the tool business until the Depression hit us in the early ‘30’sand we were finally compelled to close its doors.
I do not even like to recall those Depression days. I eventually went to work with the county highway department as Assistant Superintendent. All the jumble of TERA, WRP and those other work relief efforts was left in my hands and I don’t even like to remember it. The last few years with the county I was liaison with the Town Superintendents and with surveying several hundred miles of town and county roads. I retired in 1952 at the age of sixty. While with the county, we were not covered by social security deductions so I wanted to get work which would qualify me for it.
I had a couple of years of supervisory work with the local school bus factory which faded out. Then, I had one year as Village Clerk and Treasurer. I followed that with learning how to be a plumber which has come in good stead here at home in my declining years.
I never won a degree in college but when I returned from France, the Oswego Normal mailed me a Life Certificate to teach manual training but I never used it. There are other goals which I have not reached but (there is one) in sight (and it) is one never attained by any of my brothers and sisters. If Gladys and I live until May 13, 1978, we shall have been married sixty years. That’s a goal few couples ever reach.
To finish the record, I was born at Maplebrook June 5, 1892 and Gladys was born in Detroit September 12, 1893. Others will have to finish our final demise records. (Llewellyn passed away on October 19, 1982 at the age of 90 and Gladys passed away on June 16, 1979, ninety-eight days short of her 86th birthday. Llewellyn and Gladys achieved one of the most loftiest of goals. They were married for 61 years.)
William Frederick Russell Davis:
When I think of the everyday obstacles of the twentieth century, I can’t help but wonder how Fred ever survived as many years as he did. Overcoming the effects of infantile paralysis as he did when only eight years of age was a great triumph.
I was five years older than he was so I missed a lot of his teenage life including where and when he got his early education. Although several years older than they were, his handicap placed him in the same age group with our cousins, Howard, Albert, Ralph and Marion who lived at Powers Corners. I do not know if he went to Union Springs High School or to Oakwood Seminary but he did graduate from Cornell Law School and that law was his life’s profession.
There were gaps in his life caused by his paralytic handicap that slowed the normal progress of his teen years. Of his college years, I have little knowledge except that he graduated in 1922 and entered Judge Mosher’s law office at that time and was affiliated with Judge Mosher for a good many years. Eventually, Fred became Judge of the Children’s Court. His whole life was devoted to law and he had a good clean record there.
After Mother’s death, Fred, Polly and Dad had been living with Uncle Charlie on North Street. In 1925, he married Janet Bridgeman, a Rochester girl. The newlyweds moved into a new house on Hoopes Avenue at the east end of the city (Auburn). In the next seven years, David, Barbara and Peter were born there.
During the decade of the “Roaring Twenties”, as it came to be known, life was very unpredictable. The early passage of the prohibition laws fanned the practice of bootlegging and the making of home brew. Disregard of the law and of common decency existed in many of the newer homes such as Fred’s and Janet’s when Peter was still a baby in 1932. Their (marriage) ended in divorce. Janet returned to Rochester and her mother. Fred was left with his three children until he married his second wife, Theresa Wenzell, in 1938. His first three (children) were entering their teens by then and were a big help in rearing two more, Susan Ann and William Frederick. In the early fifties, David, Barbara and Peter found life mates of their own and started families.
David served a “trick” in the Army of Occupation in Germany after World War II. (Upon) his return home, he determined to follow in the footsteps of our ancestor, Jesse Maxwell Davis, who was one of the early settlers of Cayuga County. Alex had been a resident of Bucksport, Maine for a good many years and was their supervisor engineer of the big paper plant there. David picked Maine as his goal and many years worked in the paper plant. The plant, in its heyday, manufactured the glazed paper which was used in the now defunct weekly, Life magazine. In due course, David married a native Maine girl, Virginia Soper. They built a house on the north bank of the Alamoosook River just east of Bucksport. They have two children, Frank (24) and Jane Eliza (23). Three years ago (1974), David’s youngest brother, Dr. William F. Davis finished his residency in Bangor, Maine and came to the hamlet of Orland to settle near David.
William began his general practitioner practice over a stretch of some twenty miles south to Castine. He had reverted to the pioneer days. So far he has delivered more than a dozen babies in their homes rather than in a maternity ward. Erna and her family live nearby. Erna is the daughter of Alex and Faye and is their sole survivor. Doctor Bill and his wife, Joanne, have two little girls and a recently born son whom they have named Llewellyn. David has two children and Erna has four. This group of descendents is the focal point for summer visitors from the rest of the clan. Not only have they migrated but they have reverted to our early ancestors and formed a Quaker community of their own.
David was an organizer last year (1976) when we celebrated the Centennial by collecting a large group of canoesmen, raftmen and even some swimmers for a race down the Alamoosook River. I wish Fred could have been there but he has been gone since 1964. He could have showed them as he loved water sports and was a very good swimmer.
Fred lived most of his life in Auburn and was well liked both in his private life and his legal and political associations. Alcoholism is a disease whose victims demand my pity and respect. I am not a prohibitionist but I abhor those who make millions manufacturing the stuff. His later years were hapless ones; which I regret none of us could prevent.
Fred was born at Maplebrook on September 7, 1897 and died in Auburn on November 1, 1964 at the age of (67). He is interred beside Mother and Dad in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, NY. His first wife, Janet, is a frequent summer visitor to the Davis clan at Orland, Maine. His second wife, Theresa, lives with her sister in Auburn and frequently visits (Maine) too. It was but yesterday that we had a birthday card from Dr. Bill and Joanie telling us that they were the parents of a nine pound four ounce bouncing son named Llewellyn Oliver Davis born on November 20, 1977. Wouldn’t Fred be tickled at that.