Untitled - citizen hylbom blog

564 SOUTHEASTEEN MASSACHUSETTS
continued to occupy the family mansion until
1830, when she removed to Boston, where she
died April 1, 1847. The cliildren of William
and Eebecca (Morton) Davis were: William,
born in 1783; Nathaniel, born in 1785;
Thomas, born in 1791; and Elizabeth, born in
1803 (married Alexander Bliss and George
Bancroft, Mr. Bliss being the law partner of
Daniel Webster and Bancroft the eminent his-
The children of William and Joanna (White)
Davis were : William Whitworth, born in 1808 ;
Eebecca, born in 1810, who married Ebenezer
Grosvenor Parker and George S. Tolman ; Hannah
White, born in 1812, who married Andrew
L. Eussell; Sarah Bradford, born in 1814;
Charles Gideon, born in 1820 ; William Thomas,
born in 1822; and Sarah Elizabeth, born in
1824.
(V) Charles Gideon Davis, son of William
and Joanna (White) Davis, was born May 30,
1820, in the house now known as Plymouth
Eock House on Cole's Hill, in Plymouth, Mass.,
and enterprise by which the town was largely
benefited. On his return from Boston to Plymouth
he purchased a farm on the outskirts of
the town and built thereon the house in which
he continued to make his home the remainder
of his years. In 1854 he built the Davis build-
torian).
(IV) William Davis (2), son of William and
Eebecca (Morton) Davis, born in 1783, married
in 1807 Joanna, daughter of Capt. Gideon
White, of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, an officer in
the English army, and a direct descendant of
William White of the "Mayflower," 1620. Mr.
Davis was for a period associated in business
with his father. He died at the comparatively
early age of ing, the brick block at the corner of Eailroad
avenue in 1870, and for many years was the
largest individual holder of real estate in the
town.
forty-one years, March 22, 1824.
While a resident of Boston and scarcely beyond
his majority young Davis espoused the
cause of the slave and became one of the organizers
of the Free-soil party, in 1848. He was
one of the numerous persons arrested and tried
in 1851 for participation
in the rescue of Shadrach,
the fugitive slave. The charge was that
he was entering the court room, Shadrach was
going out, and that he held the door in such
a way as to make the escape effectual. On this
point said his brother, the late William T.
Davis, "though he was acquitted, I never knew
how much or how little, if at all, he aided the
negro in his flight." He with others, among
them the afterward war governor of Massachu-
and died July 2, 1903. He acquired his elementary
education in the home schools and in
a private school at Hingham, Mass.; furthered
his studies in the Plymouth high school, and
was prepared for college under the direction of
Hon. John A. Shaw of Bridgewater. Entering
Harvard College he was graduated therefrom
with the class of 1840. He was prepared for
the law under the direction of Hon. Jacob H.
Loud, of Plymouth, Messrs. Hubbard & Watt,
of Boston, and at the Harvard Law School. He
was admitted at the August term of the Common
Pleas court, Plymouth, 1843, and located
in Boston for the practice of his profession,
where for a decade he was engaged in an active
and increasing practice, in partnership at various
times with William H. Whitman, George P.
Sanger, who was a member of his class at Harvard,
and Seth Webb, also of Harvard, of the
class of 1843. In the early fifties, owing to
bronchial trouble, he deemed it was best to leave
Boston, so relinquished his practice there and
retired to his native town, where he ever afterward
resided, adding to his setts, John A. Andrew, and F. W. Bird, op-
professional pursuits
the vocation of operating in real estate,
in which he exhibited a degree of public spirit
posed the reelection to Congress of Eobert C.
Winthrop, and offered in Faneuil Hall the resolution
which first nominated Charles Sumner
for that honor. In 1863, the year in which he
changed his residence to Plymouth, he was a
delegate from Plymouth to the Constitutional
convention. In 1856 he was appointed a member
of the State board of agriculture (sustaining
that relation until 1877) and in the same
year chosen president of the Plymouth County
Agricultural Society, retaining the latter ofiBce
until resigning in the year 1876. In 1856 he
was one of three delegates from Massachusetts
to the convention at Pittsburg at which the Eepublican
party was organized ; was a delegate
from the First Massachusetts district to the
convention at Philadelphia in 1856, which put
John C. Fremont in nomination for president,
and to the convention at Cincinnati, in 1872,
which nominated Horace Greeley for the same
office. In 1859 he was chosen an overseer of
Harvard University for five years. In 1861
he was appointed by Governor Andrew on a
commission to propose a plan for a State agricultural
college, and after the establishment of
that institution served as one of its trustees
many years. In 1862 he represented Plymouth
in the General Court and in that same year was
appointed under the United States revenue law
assessor for the First district, holding that office
until 1869. In 1874 he was appointed Judge of
the Third District court, and remained on the