7. Grier’s turn toward education

Arkansas was never a leader in public education. Up to the Civil War, education was an entirely private industry. After the war, free public education was part of the platform of newly-freed blacks and Republicans with Union sympathies. After Reconstruction ended and the Democrats took back power in Little Rock, public schools in general – and black schools in particular ­– became political targets, with their budgets slashed according to what one educator dubbed “the starvation plan.”

As their children grew to school age, Grier and Allie Davis were dissatisfied with their options. There was a “subscription school” four miles away, then a one-room school in Allis, open just five months of the year. But they wanted their children to go to college. Grier’s priorities were changing, his daughter Hattie Belle writes. “The topic of ‘more and richer lands versus more and better schools’ took serious hold of his thinking.”

The Davises had never been a highly-educated clan, but they respected education.

Back in the Waxhaws, Sarah Nisbet Davis had sent her son Robert G. to school because she thought him too delicate for farm work. They’d lived 20 years near Oxford at a time when the University of Mississippi was getting started, and a cousin had been one of its first students. They were supporters of Erskine College in South Carolina, which had been founded in 1839 by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP), the Davises’ denomination.

Grier Davis wanted his children to attend Erskine College, but they needed a high school education first. Enter John Jefferson Lee Spence, a charismatic educator from Mississippi who wanted to build a school in nearby Wilmar. Grier gave Spence the first $100 to found the school and served on its board of directors. Beauvoir College, named for Jefferson Davis’ Alabama estate, enrolled both boys and girls, as long as they were white.

Beauvoir College lasted only 10 years, closing during the economic panic of 1907, but it played a critical role in the Davis narrative. The children of Grier and Allie Davis were determined to go on to Erskine and other colleges, but money was tight. They taught school to earn money for tuition, and helped each other. Anne helped Hattie Bell attend Erskine, and when Hattie Bell paid her back, Anne used it to help pay Oma’s tuition at seminary. Oma repaid his debt by subsidizing Roy’ education, and on it went. The family tradition of siblings helping siblings attend college carried on to the next generation and, to some extent, the generation after that.

Coleman, the oldest son, stayed to run the family farm while helping his brother and sisters attend college. Three other sons ­– Oma, Guy and Roy – became ministers, and one daughter married a pastor. Hattie Bell became a teacher, went to seminary and served as director of religious education at several of Oma’s churches. All became professionals, no longer tied to the land, and began spreading out from Allis.

Grier Davis didn’t live to see most of their achievements. He was a busy man, operating two large farms and a general merchandise store in Allis. He was a church elder and community leader. “He was too heavy,” his daughter writes, “but a mighty good looking man, and so very useful.” He died suddenly on a cold day in 1898 just short of his 48th birthday, leaving Allie and ten children, four of them under 12.

Like Sarah Nisbet Davis back in Carolina, Allie Coleman Davis became the matriarch of the clan after her husband’s unexpected death. Her lip is disfigured in the old family photos, the result of a bout with cancer. I have a faded copy of the home remedy they used to treat the cancer, a patch made with Galangal root and Chloride. She lived to age 79, a strong influence in the lives of her children and grandchildren.