Nora Fontaine Maury Davidson (19 February 1836–10 February 1929), memorialist of the Lost Cause, was born in Petersburg and was the daughter of James Davidson and Mary Harrison Butts Davidson. In later life, her interest in genealogy and her Huguenot heritage led her occasionally to inflate her mother's name to De Butts and her own middle name to de la Fontaine. Little is known about her education, which she may have received at home. She never married. During the Civil War, Davidson worked in local hospitals. She served first as the treasurer of the Ladies' Hospital and then as linen matron at Poplar Lawn Hospital from spring 1863 until autumn 1864, when the hospital was moved to Danville. Proud of her work, Davidson later referred to the commendation of her linen department by the Confederate surgeon-in-chief. She also tended to wounded soldiers. Davidson's experiences in Petersburg's hospitals, and as a resident of the besieged city, laid the foundation for her later activities as a staunch Confederate memorialist. Many women who came to believe it their patriotic duty to provide cemeteries and memorials for Southern soldiers had first witnessed the anonymous and lonely deaths of men in wartime hospitals.
Before the end of the war, in 1864 Davidson established a school for young children. Two of her sisters assisted in operating the school, which was known in its early years as the Confederate School and later as Davidson (or sometimes Davidson's) Seminary. Davidson served as principal and also taught for almost sixty years until retiring in 1923. By 1876 the school was offering classes in arithmetic, grammar, history, geography, map drawing, and declamation. In the school's early years, the students regularly performed tableaux and other entertainments as fundraisers. During the Civil War they contributed the proceeds to hospital work and to support a holiday dinner for Confederate soldiers in the city. Later pupils staged picnics, performances at the Academy of Music, and on at least one occasion a tournament, complete with a Knight of the Lost Cause. In 1877, after Davidson's students had raised funds for a monument to North Carolina Confederate troops buried in Blandford Cemetery, a local newspaper remarked on Davidson's "patriotism and energy" in successfully directing such commemorations. Davidson compiled Cullings from the Confederacy (1903), a collection of wartime poetry, letters, and anecdotes, and included a modest account of her role in honoring Petersburg's Confederate dead.
On 26 May 1866 Davidson, along with eighty of her students and other adults, decorated the graves of Confederate soldiers in Blandford Cemetery with flowers. Traveling by omnibuses decked with flags draped in mourning, the party then visited the site of the Battle of the Crater. Although the war was over, death remained inescapable. Davidson later recalled that the former battlefield was "a horrible place, as the heads of those who fell were exposed to view, these mute faces seeming to appeal for sepulture." In 1921 she recounted a much more dramatic (and probably highly inaccurate) version to a Richmond newspaper reporter, in which she remembered that a United States army soldier had chased down and killed the leader of the procession because he had been carrying a large Confederate flag.
The Ladies Memorial Association followed Davidson's visit with one of its own on 9 June 1866. Two years later Mary Cunningham Logan witnessed the commemoration of the Confederate dead at Blandford and praised it to her husband, former Union major general John Alexander Logan, an Illinois congressman and commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, who proposed the idea of a national Memorial Day. Davidson, therefore, often receives credit for having founded Confederate Memorial Day in Petersburg—along with the members of the Ladies Memorial Association—as well as Memorial Day for all fallen soldiers, but similar memorial observances had occurred across the South.
Secondary accounts often describe Davidson as a charter member of the Petersburg Ladies Memorial Association, but she does not appear on an 1866 membership roll, and she stated in a 1924 letter that she did not belong to the organization. She served as custodian of the Petersburg chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from 1913 through 1928, and in 1927 she was elected an honorary president of the UDC, Virginia Division. During the 1920s she contributed funds to erect a monument in Richmond to Matthew Fontaine Maury, a distant relation. Davidson proudly described herself in 1924 as Virginia's "oldest female voter" and a supporter of Senator Carter Glass. An invalid with failing eyesight by April 1927, Nora Fontaine Maury Davidson retired to the Petersburg Home for Ladies, where she died of influenza on 10 February 1929. She was buried in Blandford Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Correspondence in Nora Fontaine Maury Davidson Papers, Accession 34158, Library of Virginia (third quotation in Davidson to J. D. Harwell, 11 July 1924), and in Matthew Fontaine Maury Association Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va. (birth date in Davidson to Maury Association, 7 Sept. 1926); letters to Davidson in several collections, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va.; publications include Davidson, Cullings from the Confederacy… (1903), with second quotation on 155, and "Confederate Hospitals at Petersburg, VA.," Confederate Veteran 29 (1921): 338–339; Petersburg Index, 22 May 1868, 19 Nov. 1870; Petersburg Index and Appeal, 23 Aug. 1877 (first quotation); Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 May 1921, 29 May 1960; Confederate Veteran 32 (1924): 418 (portrait); John O. Peters, Blandford Cemetery: Death and Life at Petersburg, Virginia (2005), 65–70; Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008), 53, 58; Death Certificate, Petersburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Petersburg Progress-Index, 11 Feb. 1929, and Richmond News Leader, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post (with variant birth year of 1835), all 12 Feb. 1929.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Jennifer Davis McDaid.
How to cite this page:
Jennifer Davis McDaid,"Nora Fontaine Maury Davidson (1836–1929)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davidson_Nora_Fontaine_Maury, accessed [today's date]).
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