Arthur Derieux Davidson (8 October 1882–5 February 1961), journalist, was born in Manchester, which later merged with Richmond, and was the son of Joseph Edward Davidson, a carpenter, and Sarah Frances Owen Davidson. After attending the Manchester public schools, he enrolled at Richmond College (later the University of Richmond) in 1901. After a year's hiatus, Davidson resumed his studies in the autumn of 1903 and remained at the college through the 1906–1907 school term, although he did not receive a degree. On 26 March 1908 in Manchester he married Lottie Armistead Redford, a graduate of the Woman's College of Richmond. They had two sons and one daughter.

While still a student Davidson began preaching at Baptist churches. Ordained in 1904 into the Middle District Baptist Association, which was centered in Chesterfield County, he served as pastor of Gill Grove and Matoaca Baptist Churches for two years, of Arbor and Chester in 1906, and of Arbor, Graceland, and Mount Hope in 1907. Davidson shifted his affiliation the following year to the Concord Baptist Association in Southside Virginia and from 1908 through 1912 split his time among five Mecklenburg County churches: Boydton, Buffalo, Clarksville, Concord, and Liberty. For the next several years he studied theology, first at Colgate University, in New York, and then at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Kentucky. From 1915 to 1917 he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Essex County.

By 1919 Davidson had moved to Richmond, where he remained on the Baptist General Association of Virginia's list of ministers until 1921. He also worked as a real estate agent. Journalism soon became his calling. Beginning as editor of the weekly Manassas Journal in 1925, he became news editor of the Danville Register in 1926 and spent two years as an editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Davidson abandoned the stability and relative security of big-city journalism for a chancy venture, the Northern Virginia Daily, a new regional paper published in the small Shenandoah County town of Strasburg that supplanted four weeklies in Front Royal, Marshall, Strasburg, and Woodstock. In the Daily's inaugural editorial on 15 September 1932, Davidson introduced the paper as a nonpartisan and independent voice that would "express its opinion of men and movements freely" and pledged not "to make a fetish of its political status or to employ its columns for criticism that is merely destructive." Davidson took that responsibility seriously. He would often pace the sidewalk outside his office in order to collect his thoughts before pounding out an editorial, frequently on deadline. He campaigned for better roads and bridges in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Davidson also handled publicity for the State Commission on Conservation and Development, which was working to create Shenandoah National Park and a state park system. In that capacity he wrote Knights of the Golden Horseshoe (1934), a pamphlet commemorating the 1716 crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains by Alexander Spotswood's expedition.

Davidson's editorials were widely reprinted, and he won several statewide awards, including a certificate of merit from the Lee Memorial Journalism Foundation at Washington and Lee University and the Virginia Press Association in 1938 and two years later the same two groups' Lee Editorial Award, given to honor editorials that performed a community service. In a series of editorials that year Davidson had lamented the poor condition of the Shenandoah County school system and proposed several improvements to the county's government structure that augmented allocations to the schools without increasing taxes. The series undoubtedly was a factor in his appointment to the Shenandoah County School Board in 1941. After completing two terms, he retired in 1948. Davidson also served on the board and as president of the Strasburg Chamber of Commerce late in the 1930s and early in the 1940s.

After nearly twenty-four years, Davidson stepped down from the Daily on 31 May 1956. He came out of retirement a year later to serve briefly as the paper's editor during the interim between his successors. Arthur Derieux Davidson retired to Remlik in Middlesex County and died as the result of a coronary occlusion at his Richmond home on 5 February 1961. He was buried in Maury Cemetery, in Richmond.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Commonwealth 23 (July 1956): 57–58 (portrait), and John A. Cutchins, History of the Class of 1905 (1956), 75–76; Birth Register, Manchester, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Chesterfield Co. Marriage License; Strasburg Northern Virginia Daily, 15 Sept. 1932 (quotations), 1 Aug. 1940, 25 Jan. 1941, 31 May 1956, 15 Sept. 1982 (50th anniversary supplement), 15 Sept. 2007 (75th anniversary supplement); Richmond Times-Dispatch, 25 Jan. 1941; obituaries in Strasburg Northern Virginia Daily (with editorial tribute), Richmond News Leader, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, all 6 Feb. 1961, and Washington Post, 7 Feb. 1961.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John F. Horan Jr.

How to cite this page:
John F. Horan Jr.,"Arthur Derieux Davidson (1882–1961)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davidson_Arthur_Derieux, accessed [today's date]).

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