Birkett Davenport (d. 26 August 1817), member-elect of the Convention of 1776, was born about 1737 or 1738, but his birthplace and the names of his parents are not known. By 1760 he was operating a store in the new town of Fairfax (later Culpeper), in Culpeper County, and he became one of the earliest property owners there when he purchased two lots in October 1761. Davenport married Eleanor Brown about 1767. They had three daughters before her death on 6 May 1790.

Davenport had business interests in the Fredericksburg area and resided there for a time. Whether he was the Birkett Davenport who in 1769 patented land in Essex County is uncertain. In May 1770 he was appointed to the King George County Court, and he still lived in that county as late as 1774, when he sold supplies to the volunteers who served in Dunmore's War.

Davenport, back in Culpeper County, won election on 25 June 1776 to succeed Henry Field in the fifth and final Revolutionary Convention, but the convention had adjourned before he reached Williamsburg to take his seat. By virtue of that election he also became a member of the first House of Delegates in October 1776 and received Field's seat on the Committee of Public Claims. Elected to a full one-year term in the spring of 1777, Davenport served on the same committee, and also on the Committee of Trade, in the two assembly sessions that met in that year. In 1778 he either retired voluntarily or was defeated. At the end of that year he became a vestryman of Saint Mark's Parish.

Davenport was one of many relatively ordinary men who performed important public duties during the Revolutionary War without serving in the army or being well-known outside of his community. He dispensed provisions and other necessary supplies to the army and in May 1782 was appointed a district commissioner and directed to inventory the supplies in Culpeper, Fauquier, Orange, and Spotsylvania Counties. That year he became a trustee of the new town of Stevensburg. In 1794 Davenport helped establish Fairfax Lodge No. 43, the first Masonic lodge in Culpeper County. Incomplete county records leave other possibly important incidents in his public service undocumented. He was a senior member of the Culpeper County Court by 1798, but the date of his initial appointment is not known.

Davenport owned more than 2,200 acres of land in Culpeper County and paid taxes on more than two dozen slaves in 1782. Early in the 1790s he was part-owner of a nail factory in Falmouth, and he was one of the directors of a company chartered in 1793 to improve the navigation of the Rappahannock River. Birkett Davenport died, probably at his Culpeper County residence, on 26 August 1817 and was buried most likely in the family cemetery on his property.

Sources Consulted:
Several references in Raleigh Travers Green, comp., Genealogical and Historical Notes on Culpeper County, Virginia (1900); wife identified in Culpeper Co. Deed Book, S:40–41, and in Mary D. Coleman, "Some Cemeteries in Culpeper County, Virginia" (typescript, 1945–1947), Accession 22676, both Library of Virginia; Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), 6:345; William J. Van Schreeven et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), 7:616–617; Davenport to Benjamin Harrison, 20 May 1782, Davenport to Col. William Davies, 20 May 1782, 23 Sept. 1782, 5 Oct. 1782, all in Benjamin Harrison Executive Papers, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia; Land and Personal Property Tax Returns, Culpeper Co. (1782), all in Record Group 48, Library of Virginia; portrait in collection of Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Old Salem Museum and Gardens, Winston-Salem, N.C.; will and estate inventory and accounts in Culpeper Co. Will Book, H:27, 42, 55, Library of Virginia; death notice (age seventy-nine) in Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, 3 Sept. 1817.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter,"Birkett Davenport (d. 1817)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015, revised 2018 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davenport_Birkett, accessed [today's date]).

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