Nicholas Baker Davidson (9 October 1867–13 November 1936), businessman and civic leader, was born in Farmville and was the son of William Meade Davidson, a clerk, and Julia Flippen Wiltse Davidson. He attended the local public schools and in the 1890s or earlier joined his cousin Edward C. Wiltse in the grocery business of Wiltse and Davidson. They dissolved the partnership in June 1895, and Davidson became the sole proprietor. On 4 February 1896 he married Edna Rothwell Gilliam Morris, of Farmville. They had no children, but he helped raise her son from her first marriage. They also raised twins, the son and daughter of his sister who had died shortly after their birth in 1911, and later in that decade a girl joined the household whom the Davidsons called their daughter.

By 1903 N. B. Davidson had begun operating a dry goods store, and in November of that year he purchased the stock of a local clothing store following the owner's death. Later he established a shoe store and constructed a large new department store that opened in Farmville during the summer of 1920. The company also had an office in Richmond. In 1925 he chartered his business as Davidson's, Incorporated (beginning in 1934 Southside Department Store, Incorporated). It became the largest such store in the area and remained in business for nearly thirty years after Davidson's death. As part of the advertising for the Farmville store, which retained Davidson's name, he published a regular column in the weekly Farmville Herald during 1931 setting forth his opinions on politics and economics.

Davidson invested in and promoted several other Farmville businesses. In 1912 he and Fred Hall Hanbury founded the Buffalo Shook Company, Incorporated, which produced staves, headings, and liners for tobacco hogsheads and later other kinds of millwork and shipping containers. Davidson became vice president of the Farmville Creamery, which began operation in 1922. A vice president of the Farmville Hotel Corporation, which erected and opened the Hotel Weyanoke in 1925, he served as president of the hotel's board from 1934 to 1936. Davidson also purchased in 1924 a part-interest in the local Farmville Lithia Springs, a supplier of mineral water to an international market. He numbered among the leaders of a committee that organized the Prince Edward Industrial Development Company, Incorporated, which in 1934 persuaded the Craddock-Terry Company, a Lynchburg shoe manufacturer, to open a factory in Farmville. Within five and a half years the company met its commitment to pay more than $750,000 in wages to its Farmville employees.

Davidson served as president of the First National Bank of Farmville from its opening in 1901 until his death. Late in 1909 the bank consolidated with the Citizens State Bank. As one of the principal banks in the region, it grew rapidly, with assets of about $500,000 in 1910, more than $700,000 in 1918, and more than $1.3 million at the end of 1929. The institution survived the wave of bank failures during the Great Depression and thrived during the following decades, becoming part of First Virginia Banks, Inc., in 1986.

Davidson served on the Farmville town council from 1896 to 1898, from 1902 to 1904, and from 1908 to 1910. During his third term the council began negotiating the purchase of the company that supplied water to the town in order to operate it as a public utility. Davidson was elected to the council again in December 1913 but declined to serve. In 1920 when the town held no election, a circuit court judge appointed him to the council for the 1920–1922 term. In the interim, Davidson represented the Farmville Magisterial District on the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors between April 1915 and June 1918.

Active in local Democratic Party politics, Davidson served as an officer in William Hodges Mann's unsuccessful campaign for the gubernatorial nomination in 1905. Between the 1910s and 1930s Davidson also took part in several local and statewide organizations to improve roads and highways, and he advocated improvements to transportation in his advertisements for the First National Bank. Beginning with the first plans to build a hospital in Farmville in 1913, Davidson helped in the organizing and fund-raising efforts that eventually succeeded in opening a new hospital in 1927, with himself as a member of its board of directors.

Davidson, who raised tobacco on the farmland that he owned, joined about 1,000 other tobacco growers who met in Farmville in July 1932 and created the Virginia Dark Fired Tobacco Growers' Marketing Association to devise a more satisfactory way of grading and selling tobacco by public auction at a time when a drought had reduced production and the Great Depression threatened tobacco growers with financial ruin. Elected president of the association in August, Davidson presided over the growth of the organization's membership to about 8,000 farmers in fourteen Virginia counties. On the association's behalf, he negotiated with the federal government that autumn as the government sought to stabilize commodity markets.

In September 1934 a group of Farmville businessmen formed the Five County Fair Association (encompassing Amelia, Buckingham, Charlotte, Cumberland, and Prince Edward Counties), with Davidson as chair. In spite of rain, more than 10,000 visitors attended the first fair the following month. The association, incorporated in August 1935, sponsored an annual fair into the twenty-first century. In 1928 when the Farmville Golf Club laid out its first course, part of it was on Davidson's property, although the course was later moved to another site.

Nicholas Baker Davidson died of kidney disease at a Charlottesville hospital on 13 November 1936. His funeral in Farmville drew more than 2,000 mourners. He was buried in Westview Cemetery there.

Sources Consulted:
Birth Register, Prince Edward Co. (with variant birth date of Feb. 1868), and Marriage Register, Prince Edward Co. (with variant date of 3 Feb. 1896), both in Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Farmville Herald, 7 Feb. 1896 (married "last Tuesday," 4 Feb. 1896); Today and Yesterday in the Heart of Virginia: A Reprint of the Edition of the Farmville Herald, March 29, 1935, Illustrated (1935); Herbert Clarence Bradshaw, History of Prince Edward County, Virginia, From Its Earliest Settlements through Its Establishment in 1754 to Its Bicentennial Year (1955) and History of Farmville, Virginia, 1798–1948 (1994); business, political, and professional career documented in Farmville Herald; BVS Death Certificate, Charlottesville (with variant birth date of 8 Oct. 1868); obituaries in Lynchburg Daily Advance, Roanoke Times, and Roanoke World-News, all 14 Nov. 1936, Petersburg Progress-Index, 15 Nov. 1936, Farmville Herald, 20 (with birth date, portrait, and editorial tribute) Nov. 1936, and Appomattox Times-Virginian, 19 Nov. 1936.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Emily J. Salmon.

How to cite this page:
Emily J. Salmon,"Nicholas Baker Davidson (1867–1936)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davidson_Nicholas_Baker, accessed [today's date]).

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