Without doubt, it is the most important book about Santa Rosa’s history ever written.
The new edition of the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery book is out and it’s unlike anything that came before. Normally such a listing of burials is a dry reference work only used by genealogists or someone seeking where great uncle Fletcher is buried on the hill. This is more like an encyclopedic collection of grand short stories, more than five thousand tales long.
Volunteers Sandy Frary and Ray Owen dedicated nearly fourteen years assembling the material via primary source research, scouring all manner of databases and conducting interviews with descendants. The result is both highly accurate and readable; although he may not be your great uncle Fletcher, you’ll enjoy meeting him.
The co-authors were well-suited for this kind of project. Sandy worked at the County Sheriff’s Office for a quarter century and since then has spent years as a volunteer at the Coroner’s Office researching old records. Ray had 33 years of experience in security background investigations with the Army and U.S. Civil Service Commission (now the Office of Personnel Management).
The book costs $45. To place an order, contact the Santa Rosa Recreation and Parks Dept. at (707) 543-3737 after June 1st.
[Editorial note: My interviews with Sandy and Ray were conducted separately but are merged here according to topic. In full disclosure, I contributed a couple of stories and handled the cover artwork.]
QUESTION: What were the earlier attempts to document the cemetery?
SANDY: The Sonoma County Genealogical Society compiled early Rural Cemetery burial records into a word processing program. Alan and Margaret Phinney then converted those records into a true sortable database. In 1996, they organized a thorough survey of the Rural Cemetery which yielded hundreds of corrections to dates, spelling of names and other statistical information. The previous Rural Cemetery Burial Listing book was published in 2007 with Alan and Margaret as the editors.
Q: When did you start working on the project?
RAY: I got started on this in 1996, when Margaret Phinney called me to ask if I would be willing to participate in a survey of the cemetery. Afterwards the Phinneys gave me a list of over a hundred items. There were markers with names but no dates, stones that were scattered away from where they should be, unidentified plots, and I was successful with 80-90 of the items. After that they kept sending me names to research.
SANDY: Starting in March of 2007, I spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for six months traipsing through the Rural Cemetery making gravestone rubbings in order to capture and record the epitaphs on all the aging gravestones. Eventually my diligence caught the attention of Alan Phinney, who was then head of the volunteer maintenance crew. Alan and Margaret felt it was time to turn their cemetery database over to someone else and chose me to take over.
Q: How many entries were there when you began?
SANDY: I don’t recall the exact number of entries when I began, but there were around 5,000.
Q: How many now, and how many were deleted because the person was actually buried at the county cemetery or somewhere else?
SANDY: As of now, there are 5,515 burials on record, and I have deleted 367 entries.
Q: Can you describe how you worked together?
RAY: When Sandy took over she would forward questions to me. Sometime they came from inquiries directed to her but often she wanted more information on a person in the database. I also have a special interest in veterans, since we put flags on their graves on Memorial Day. I discovered a number of vets who had family markers but were unknown to be former soldiers, sailors or Marines.
SANDY: For years, Ray spent as many as five days a week at the County History and Genealogy Library going through microfilm reels of old newspapers, the California death index, census records, etc. He was EXTREMELY prolific, providing thousands and thousands and thousands of Xeroxed copies of information for me to add to the database.
Q: What was your research process – how did you know what to research?
RAY: If I had vital data, I would go directly to the newspaper microfilm to find the obituary. The Democrat carried more obituaries than the Republican, but the Republican’s were often more comprehensive and accurate. Otherwise I started with death records, census, the county library’s Local History Index and later, Ancestry.com.
SANDY: Actually, I didn’t really know what or how to research when I took over the database. But by luck, one morning [my late husband] Jim and I were having breakfast at the Piner Café, and I ran into a Sheriff’s sergeant who had worked at the Coroner’s Office. He told me about the interesting old Coroner’s Death Records that were housed there. And that got me thinking.
I wrote a letter to the Sheriff and asked if he would allow me to access the Coroner’s old death records so I could look for anyone who was buried in the Rural Cemetery. The Sheriff approved my request, and instructed the Chief Deputy Coroner to provide me with a desk and a computer. Then the Chief Deputy Coroner ordered a large fireproof cabinet to house the old death records because he assumed that I would be bringing up the records that were housed in the dark, damp basement, and I could then store them in the cabinet within the Coroner’s Office.
Thus began months of researching the death records. I was thrilled to find death records of Rural Cemetery residents and information I could add to their burial listings. Plus, I even found some death records for Jeremy Nichols for people he was not even aware of who were buried in the Chanate Historic Cemetery. And I was thrilled to also have access to all the old Coroner’s inquest. I was in heaven!
Eventually the Chief Deputy Coroner asked me to identify all the people buried in the County of Sonoma indigent Cemetery. So I asked if he would contact the Deputy County Clerk and ask for permission for me to access the Sonoma County death certificates. He did, and the Deputy County Clerk approved. Thus began approximately three years of working two days a week at the Recorder’s Office going through thousands of death certificates. At first I researched the indigent burials and was able to identify all the people buried there. Then I spent several years going through over four thousand death certificates for the Rural Cemetery and was able to add TONS of information to the burial listings, such as cause of death, name of parents, name of spouse, where born, home address, etc.
Q: There are about 900 new entries in this edition. Where did you find so many lost people?
RAY: Some of the older obituaries and death records said a burial was at “Santa Rosa Cemetery.” We did not realize for quite a long time that it was synonymous with Rural, but since Odd Fellows was established in 1885 and Calvary in 1888, all entries before then had to be Rural. We added quite a few names that way.
A lot were also random finds while looking for something else. If I was looking for an obituary I would go over the following five or six days as well. That turned out productive enough that I continued to do it.
When the place of burial wasn’t mentioned I looked for the spouse. In many cases an obit said the deceased was buried next to a wife or husband whom we already knew was in Rural. Or if there was a family of five but only four were known to be in Rural, what happened to the fifth?
Q: Do you know of any other cemetery documentation project like this?
SANDY: No, and I can’t imagine anyone else being as crazy/obsessed as Ray and I have been. Plus, because of my previous 25 years at the Sheriff’s Office, I was given the privilege of accessing ALL the Coroner’s old death records. And because of my affiliation with the Coroner’s Office, I was given access to ALL the Sonoma County death certificates, I don’t imagine there are many people who are as privileged as I have been to access such valuable information for so long, especially with today’s confidentiality issues.
Q: Another part of the historical record are the maps. What can be learned from them? How accurate are they?
SANDY: The original old historical cemetery maps (I have several original maps) show not only the layout of the cemetery, but also and the original numbering of each plot. Before these maps were discovered, cemetery maps showed that in some areas there were no plots, and plots in other areas were sometimes assigned random numbers, as in Moke Cemetery. With the discovery of the old maps, I was able to restore the original plot numbering and put plots in areas which had shown no plots.
Several years back, Bill Northcroft surveyed Moke Cemetery in order to determine the boundary of each plot. As a result, this changed the plot number of some of the burials there, which I have corrected in the database.
With the help of Gary Pasqualetti of the Applied Technology Department at Santa Rosa Junior College, we were able to piece together all the original maps and produce an anatomically correct blueprint of Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.
Q: Do you believe there are more burials to be found?
SANDY: Yes, I believe there are. I also believe that when the book hits the street, people will be contacting me to inquire as to why their relative(s), whom they say are buried in the Rural Cemetery, is/are not included in the book -and then our research will surely pick up again as we discover more burials to add to the database.
Q: How will corrections and additions be made?
SANDY: I will be adding corrections and additions to the Rural Cemetery database as often as I get them, which will probably be the rest of my life!
Q: Will there be an online version, at least an index of names?
SANDY: We had discussed the possibility of turning the burial listing book into an e-book. However the City has nixed this idea because they don‘t want to deal with offering/selling digital products, at least this is my understanding. We have not discussed the possibility of providing the public with at least an index of names. However, this is something to consider.
We can all use some good news (heaven knows) so let’s celebrate the restored good looks of John and Philena Richards’ monument at the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.
Volunteers Steve Lovejoy and Jonathan Quandt spent the better part of July 13 scrubbing off decades of accumulated moss, lichen and grit. Lovejoy says the biological solution they used will continue to kill the algae growth as it seeps into the stone and the marble should further whiten up with time.
John Richards, who died in 1879, was Sonoma County’s first civil rights activist and tireless advocate for the education of African-American children, even funding a teacher for them because the town would not allow them into public school. Richards was profiled here as part of the series on notable African-Americans in 19th century Santa Rosa.
As mentioned in that article, this monument was originally so distinctive the town newspaper encouraged readers to visit the cemetery to see it. The stonework company even signed its name at the base of the steps, something I’ve not seen elsewhere at the cemetery. From the description transcribed below it has been considerably vandalized; there were urns with doves perched on the rim, all in white Italian marble, with a statue of a “faithful dog” at its base. It surely must have been something to see.
Work performed by Steve Lovejoy and Jonathan Quandt (wearing the safety vest). Photos by Carole Quandt
A Handsome Monument, the marble work placed above the remains of the late John Richards in the Santa Rosa Cemetery deserves more than a passing notice. The lot is enclosed with a wall of Folsom granite, two feet in height and handsomely finished. The base of the monument is of Folsom granite two feet in height, surmounted by a moulded marble base eighteen inches high, then comes the die cap, two and a half foot in height, and surmounted by a cap ten inches in height, and above this is an urn two feet two inches in height, the whole forming a most handsome piece of monumental work, and all except the base is of Italian marble. From the base of the monument to the entrance of the lot is something we have not seen in another cemetery in this county, a marble walk forty-two inches wide and thirteen feet in length. It adds greatly to the appearance of the grounds. There are two urns about three feet in height, tastefully disposed about the lot representing a laver. on the rim of each is perched a dove, all of beautiful white Italian marble. At the foot of the grave is a foot stone with the initials “J. R.” tastefully worked, and at the head is one of the urns above mentioned, and a statue representing a faithful dog deposing at the base of it. The whole grounds are most tastefully arranged, the marble and granite work, costing not less than $2,000, and are well worth a visit. The workmanship is that of A. C Thompson. Petaluma, who took the first premium at the recent exhibition of the Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society.
It came to this: He was afraid to step outside at night because they might be waiting for him in the dark.
His attackers during 1886 were a troupe of Santa Rosa boys who thought it was great fun to pelt Henry’s little house with stones and other objects, with Henry sometimes being struck himself. The boys made a project of it, curating rotten chicken eggs and spoiled fruit along with heavy-but-throwable rocks, hauling this ammunition stockpile down to the poorest part of town on First Street. His door was their target, but sometimes the missiles went through windows.
The harassment had gone on for a while – weeks, maybe months – while his pleas for help were ignored by the authorities. “The Marshal told him that the boys would not do it if they did not think it annoyed him, and they do it to hear the old gentleman complain”, reported the Democrat newspaper in January. Another item about the ongoing attacks appeared nine months later, with the comment it was too bad that it was happening because Henry and his wife were such good Christians.
The boys likely picked on the Davisons because they were African-Americans. Santa Rosa in the 19th century never had much tolerance for its non-white residents, and 1886 was particularly bad – on a downtown street that summer, a youth repeatedly beat a Chinese man in the head with an iron bar; no arrests were made and the newspaper waved it off with the same “boys will be boys” attitude.
Henry was also an easy target because he was elderly (67) and had the humblest job in town, shining shoes at Gus Koch’s barber shop on the corner of Mendocino and Fourth Street. His nickname was even “Shiner” – and let’s not overlook that was also racist slang for anyone with a black complexion.
Another reason they may have gone after him was because he had to be a liar or a fabulist. There were stories told about him which couldn’t possibly be true – such a frail, old shoeshine man in a farmtown like Santa Rosa couldn’t have known famous people, taken part in historic events or done any other remarkable things. It all had to be made up. Right?
This is the third and final installment in the series “THE HIDDEN LIVES OF BLACK SANTA ROSA.” Each of the other profiles had lost or fragmentary chapters where we don’t know much about the early parts of their story. For Henry Davison, the pages in the whole middle section of his book are ripped out.
Henry William Davison was born in Savannah on August 12, 1819. Lloyd Belton, who researched Davison’s genealogy as part of his PhD work on black abolitionists, believes his mother was a Jamaican house slave and his father was her white English slaveowner. Both Henry and his brother George were likely slaves at birth.
We first meet Henry as a teenager in New York City. How he got there is unknown; he and George might have escaped or been released from slavery. What we do know is that he was smart, articulate and a radical abolitionist – which meant he believed all slavery in the U.S. should be abolished immediately, some arguing it should be done by any means necessary including violence (John Brown being that most famous adherent).
Despite his youth, Henry was a firebrand within the early American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), the first national group fighting to end slavery. This was cutting-edge activism in the 1830s, years before the more famous figures we celebrate today such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman.
There was a schism within AASS from the beginning; on one side were the radical abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison, a white printer who was also an early advocate of women’s rights. Opposing them were those who believed in the older colonization movement, which thought white Americans would never welcome freed slaves as equals and thought it was best for them to emigrate to Liberia in Africa or maybe Central America.1 That faction also opposed allowing women to vote or even join in anti-slavery societies.
Henry Davison was firmly tethered to the Garrison camp, and while still eighteen founded the black-only “Garrison Anti-Slavery Society” in New York City, the use of the name to probably signal there was no question about which side of the fence they stood. A few months later a letter from Henry was published in The Liberator (the weekly abolitionist newspaper published by Garrison in Boston). There Davison denounced colonizationists as “apologists,” a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and called their associated church a “nest of unclean birds” (nice phrase, that). This drew sharp responses from leaders of that movement.
Despite his youth Henry was a rising star in AASS, being part of the New York state delegation at their 1839 convention when the organization had over a quarter-million members nationwide. There he must have rubbed shoulders with the men and women who were founding the Underground Railroad.
His life as a radical abolitionist shifted in his twenties as he became an AASS organizer in Jamaica, working under the umbrella of Oberlin College. This was right after full emancipation was granted in the British West Indies, and the Herculean task was helping the former slaves build an autonomous society while staving off efforts by the planters to dominate. He went to work for the London Missionary Society, which was more experienced in culture building (culture imposing might be a better way to say it) and was affiliated with another British charity focused just on public education. (The pay was likely better than AASS, too.)
Now we’ve come to the part of his lifestory where the middle chapters are missing. In 1849 he married Jane Rachael Malliet, the daughter of a Jamaican planter and who is buried next to him at Santa Rosa’s Rural Cemetery. But little is known from 1850 until he arrives in Sonoma county in 1870 aside from a few lines in his obituary, which seem to be badly garbled. Our loss is that the writer drops the intriguing tease that Henry “had some startling experiences.”
Some of it involves the Panama Railroad. Before the transcontinental train, people were desperate for a faster route between the East Coast and San Francisco – the best anyone could do in the mid-19th century was building a railroad across Panama, which shaved months off the trip of sailing around South America. Construction began in 1850 and would take five years to complete; it was brutal work and involved many Jamaican laborers, which might have been Henry’s connection to the initial project. The obit stated he was “appointed head steward by the chief engineer.” Years later, after the trains began running he was supposedly involved with the railroad again; during that time there was at least one incident where abolitionists used the trip to assist slaves escaping their slaveholders.2
Davison’s “startling experiences” supposedly happened in 1856, when he “accompanied General Walker to Nicaragua.” This is not the place to dig into the complicated (and very weird) story of William Walker; all Gentle Reader needs to know is he was an American freebooter who invaded Nicaragua that year, had himself named president and re-legalized slavery, all part of a plan to annex the country to the U.S. as a new slave-holding state. For more there’s Wikipedia, an entertaining animated short video that rushes through most of his story and a first-rate thesis which should be turned into a book (PDF).
No matter how hard one tries, there’s no way to square the circle on this story – an African-American abolitionist like Davison would have no truck with a rabid white supremacist such as Walker, who not only wanted to bring slaves from southern states but reboot the African slave trade. While I’ll easily believe Henry could have been in Nicaragua at the time and had come away with some ripping yarns about the chaos there, methinks the obituary writer must have gotten the details upside down.
Whatever startling experiences he had there, that marks the beginning of his untraceable years. What happened to their children? We don’t know (their youngest, Henry Jr. was born in Jamaica the year after he was in Nicaragua). Why did they come to Sonoma county – did they have friends here? We don’t know. Once they arrived in Santa Rosa, why did he (apparently) have no connection with the network of Bay Area civil rights activists, even though some of the East Coast abolitionists from his past were in San Francisco? We don’t know.
Intersection of Mendocino and Fourth streets in Santa Rosa c. 1870, when Henry Davison arrived. The courthouse and jail are seen at left; on the opposite corner is the Roney Building, which was where Davison shined shoes in Gus Koch’s barber shop. This is likely another drawing by African-American artist Grafton Tyler Brown (see intro). Image courtesy Sonoma County Library
He was 50/51 in 1870 when he and Jane landed in Santa Rosa and until he died almost thirty years later, he led a nondescript life.
He made 25¢ for four shoeshines – to just earn as much as a California farm laborer, he needed to shine a minimum of 46 shoes every day. It was barely enough to live on; his obituary stated he “subsisted almost entirely upon the charity of the friends he made in better days.” Still, he needed to beg for public charity. The year before the boys began pelting the Davison’s home with rocks and rotten eggs, the Board of Supervisors authorized the treasurer to make his rent payment (such grants to the destitute were not unusual).
Besides having his house stoned – and the police refusing to do anything to stop it – Davison endured other indignities in Santa Rosa.
Right after he arrived in 1871, Henry registered to vote. The Registrar of Voters began requiring a physical description in the 1890s; while the data for 1892 appear correct, in 1896 Henry was identified as a blue-eyed blonde in the Great Register. It probably was just a racist prank, but we can’t rule out it might have been a ruse to block him from casting his ballot.
Then there was the fundraiser for the San Francisco Midwinter Fair. The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago had been such a hit that it was decided to have a big exposition in Golden Gate Park to boost California, including an exhibit of Sonoma County products (Healdsburg’s contribution was a prune bridge). This project consumed the county and particularly Santa Rosa; hundreds of articles appeared in the Democrat about meetings to plan planning meetings and committees formed to form subcommittees. It kept much of the town busy for months.
To help pay the necessary expenses, there were three nights of entertainments by local people presented at the big Athenaeum theater at the corner of Fourth and D. The first half of each show was like an amateur vaudeville bill, with a string of singers, piano players and fiddlers (I confess surprise at finding one act was a “trapeze performance by the Cole family”). The second part of the program was a rehearsed production, of sorts. One evening it was the portrayal of a schoolday with the “Mud-Alley Kindergarten” which was apparently as adorable as it sounded, and another night it was “Ye Old Folk’s Concert.” But the evening that was most popular, according to the Democrat, had a revue done in blackface:
The second night of the Midwinter Fair entertainment in the Athenaeum was in every way worthy to follow its predecessor. There was not the burlesque which characterized the first evening’s performance, though the audience found much to laugh at in the admirable and varied makeups of the ladies and gentlemen who took their daintiest steps for the cake. To say that the aggregation of counterfeit Africans was elite would be bare of hyperbole. There was nothing shabby or rowdyish in the character representation. The elegance of the costumes and toilets added a zest to the fun of guessing the identities which were concealed beneath the curled hair and prepared cork. The march which preceded the walk for the cake abounded in graceful evolutions, all ot which were paired off in a manner appropriate to the occasion…C. B. Kirkpatrick, as “Shiner,” was a feature of the cake walk. Campbell should take out patent papers on his admirable impersonation of the character.
Maybe that was not the lowest depth to which our 19th century Santa Rosa ancestors ever sunk, but mocking an impoverished 74 year-old man has to rank near the bottom. The worst part is that I doubt any of them even considered the cruelty of having a good laugh at his expense.
Henry W. Davison died in 1899, nine years after Jane (she had no obituary, nor even a single-line death notice in the paper). As an indigent, he was about to be buried in the Potter’s Field when the Press Democrat stepped in and paid to have him laid to rest next to his wife in the regular part of the cemetery. I don’t believe the newspaper ever did anything like that again, and it’s unknown why they offered this act of charity – although the paper slipped some PR into his obituary by pointing out “…the additional expense of the interment consequent to his being placed where he wished being borne by the Press Democrat.” This doesn’t completely explain why, but keep in mind the journal was no longer the old Democrat edited by the racist Thompson brothers, but now helmed by a new generation of young men who grew up in Santa Rosa. I have a theory which needs more background to explain than is appropriate here, which is explored in the story about the origins of the PD.
Of all the mysteries whispered in the old Rural Cemetery, the story of Henry Davison stands among the most haunting. He should not have ended up here as he did; he should not have ended up here at all. Henry Davison should have ended up as one of the storied men in the quest for slavery’s end and then the long struggle for equal rights. But something happened and we’ll probably never know what caused his retreat. When Act II of his life took place in the Caribbean, Henry Davison was an educated man who likely had considerable leadership abilities and political skills. When the curtain rose for Act III in Santa Rosa, we saw on stage a man with his back bent low over the feet of less notable men, working at an unskilled job usually held by boys, or men with damaged wits. There must be a story there that none know.
1 Abraham Lincoln was a colonizationist before the Emancipation Proclamation, and in 1862 pushed forward a plan to resettle District of Columbia’s freed slaves at the Chiriquí province of Panama, which the Republican Press suggested should be called “The Colony of Linconia.”
2 In “The Negro Trail Blazers of California,” researcher Delilah Beasley tells the story about abolitionists in 1856 intercepting a family of slaves who were being taken by a Virginia slaveholder to work on a ranch near Petaluma (!) but en route plans were made for the family to escape once the journey ended in San Francisco. The crews on the steamers were supposedly entirely black, and the train porters were probably black as well.
Court-house.- From and after this day the undersigned will give the best polish with first-class blacking – no acid — at 4 shines for 25c. His old friends and customers are requested to call and patronize the pioneer old man, H. W. Davidson.
– Daily Democrat, November 10 1877
On motion of Supervisor Coulter the Board ordered that a warrant be drawn on the County Treasurer in favor of Proctor, Reynolds & Co., for payment of house rent occupied by Henry W. Davidson, (colored) alias “Shiner.”
– Sonoma Democrat, December 12 1885
Malicious Mischief.
Henry Davis, better known as “Shiner,” has made a complaint to the city authorities against a gang of hoodlums of tender years, who take delight in bothering the old couple. They throw large stones and missiles of every description against the old gentleman’s cottage door, and he further states that he is afraid to stir outside of his house after dark, as he has frequently been struck with stones, decayed vegetables, and antiquated hen fruit at different times. The Marshal told him that the boys would not do it if they did not think it annoyed him, and they do it to hear the old gentleman complain. It is carrying the joke a little too far, aud some of them may get hurt when the old gentleman gets up his ire.
– Sonoma Democrat, January 23 1886
Not Pleasant.
Old Uncle Davidson (colored) alias “Shiner,” complains that his aged wife and himself are very much annoyed by a few young hoodlums who make a practice of throwing rocks and other missiles against their door, and on one or two occasions through the windows, while they are engaged in their religious devotions. The old couple, although a littie off color, possess as white hearts as the average of mankind, and are very strict in what they term their religious duties. The old gentleman says there is not a day passes that they do not read their Bible and say their Litany; and it is not hard to agree with him that it is not pleasant to have rocks, decayed fruit, etc., hurled through the door, when it is open, and against it, when it is shut, while the inmates are thus engaged.
– Sonoma Democrat, September 4 1886
The second night of the Midwinter Fair entertainment in the Athenaeum was in every way worthy to follow its predecessor. There was not the burlesque which characterized the first evening’s performance, though the audience found much to laugh at in the admirable and varied makeups of the ladies and gentlemen who took their daintiest steps for the cake. To say that the aggregation of counterfeit Africans was elite would be bare of hyperbole. There was nothing shabby or rowdyish in the character representation. The elegance of the costumes and toilets added a zest to the fun of guessing the identities which were concealed beneath the curled hair and prepared cork. The march which preceded the walk for the cake abounded in graceful evolutions, all ot which were paired off in a manner appropriate to the occasion…C. B. Kirkpatrick, as “Shiner,” was a feature of the cake walk. Campbell should take out patent papers on his admirable impersonation of the character.
– Sonoma Democrat, December 23 1893
SHINER GONE HOME Found Dead in His Room Here Thursday Horning The Little Old Man Laid to Rest at Eventide Beside His Wife in the Cemetery
Henry W. Davison, known, however, to every man, woman and child in Santa Rosa at the present time and for many years past as “Shiner” Davis, the little, old, tottering colored man, is no more.
Thursday morning shortly before 11 o’clock, Bert Gardner, in a room of whose house on First street old “Shiner” resided, discovered the old man lying on the floor beside his bed quite dead, and he had been so apparently for several hours.
Everything was very still in the old man’s room on Thursday morning. A little before 11 o’clock Mrs. Gardner went to the door to see if he wanted something to eat.
She called to him, but received no reply. Becoming alarmed she called her husband, who was outside, who, in company with a neighbor Mr. Thompson, went to the room and found Mr. Davison had passed away. He was partially undressed.
Undertaker Pedersen was notified, and so was Coroner Pierce, who held an inquest later in the day, the verdict being in accordance with the testimony. A Press Democrat representative ascertained from Mr. Gardner that the old man had frequently expressed a wish to be buried in Rural cemetery by his wife, who died here in 1890. Mr. Pedersen, who has the contract for burying the county indigents, was consulted. It was found there would be extra expense beyond that allowed by the county if the old man’s wish was complied with, and his remains buried in his lot at the cemetery beside those of his wife, instead of in the potter’s field.
Late in the afternoon the old man’s body was laid to rest. The funeral was a quiet affair but the old man was not buried in the lonely potter’s field. Old “Shiner’s” last wish was gratified, the additional expense of the interment consequent to his being placed where he wished being borne by the Press Democrat.
Henry W. Davison was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 12, 1819. His father was an Englishman and his mother was a native of the island of Jamaica. At 13 years of age he left Georgia and went to New York, where shortly after becoming of age he secured a position with the missionaries sent out by Oberlin university to Jamaica. He taught the Jamaicans under the direction of the society for some time, and later became associated with the London missionary society. Returning to New York he joined the Congregational church, and in 1848 started for Aspinwall, having been appointed head steward by the chief engineer of the Panama railroad. The following year he returned to Jamaica for his health, and the same year, 1849, was married there to a daughter of Jean Marjeatte, a planter.
In 1B56 he accompanied General Walker to Nicaragua, and had some startling experiences while with him. Later he returned to New York, went thence to Aspinwall again, and in 1870 came to Petaluma, moving to Santa Rosa the same year, where he resided until the day of his death. For many years he ran a bootblack stand in Koch’s barber shop. His wife died in this city on April 4, 1890. “Shiner” was a kind hearted old man, and for several years had subsisted almost entirely upon the charity of the friends he made in better days.
