Jennie Eliza Davis (11 June 1857–31 October 1935), editor, was born in Troy, New York, and was the daughter of Susan Fisher Davis and Charles Davis. She completed high school in Troy, attended preparatory school for one year, and graduated from Vassar College in 1878. Davis taught mathematics and physics at an academy in Middleburgh, New York, during the 1878–1879 academic year and then joined the faculty of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University), where she began teaching mathematics and science. During the 1881–1882 term she was also acting lady principal in charge of the female students. Davis went back to Vassar in 1884 to teach for two years. Like many other women of her generation in the education profession, she never married.

Jane E. Davis, as she was professionally known, returned to Hampton in 1886 and resumed teaching mathematics and science. She relinquished mathematics to another faculty member about 1893 and in 1899 joined the editorial staff of the Southern Workman. Then in its twenty-eighth year, the institute's monthly magazine published news and information about Hampton, its faculty, and its graduates, as well as lectures, articles, book reviews, and essays on topics in African American and American Indian history and education. Davis ceased teaching and in 1900 became the full-time editor of the journal, which expanded from forty to sixty-four pages that same year. She modified the publication's format to resemble illustrated professional journals, gradually reduced the amount of information about alumni, and increased the number and length of the other types of articles. Davis printed (and sometimes wrote) long reports on the annual conferences that the institute sponsored. She published scores of her own articles on a variety of economic, social, ethnographic, and educational topics during her tenure at the Southern Workman, many of them unattributed but many signed as J. E. Davis, rather than with her full name.

In 1900 Davis began writing a series of articles for the Workman on the landscape and people of early eastern Virginia, which she collected and published as Round about Jamestown: Historical Sketches of the Lower Virginia Peninsula (1907). A revised and slightly enlarged edition appeared under the title Jamestown and Her Neighbors on Virginia's Historic Peninsula (1928). In 1910 Davis began a year's sabbatical in Europe and North Africa. The following year she took charge of the institute's publication office, where she managed public relations and continued to edit the Southern Workman, which remained one of the institute's most visible publicity organs. Beginning in 1902 she also headed Hampton's new Nature-Study Bureau, which issued leaflets and created nature-study libraries to encourage the classroom study of plants, animals, and soil.

Davis retired from the Southern Workman in December 1926 but continued to write for that influential journal for another four years. Jennie Eliza Davis developed what was probably cancer and sought treatment at a Philadelphia hospital, where she died on 31 October 1935. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Troy, New York.

Sources Consulted:
Autobiographical information, including full name and self-reported birth date, in Vassar Alumnae Office Questionnaire, 27 Nov. 1929, Special Collections, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; a few Davis letters and other biographical data in several collections at Harvey Library, Hampton University, Hampton, Va.; Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (2006), portrait on 4; death and funeral notices in Troy Times Record, 1 Nov. 1935; obituaries in Newport News Daily Press, 1 Nov. 1935, and Richmond Planet, 9 Nov. 1935; memorials in Southern Workman 65 (1936): 3–4, 10–13, 70–71, 281–282.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter,"Jennie Eliza Davis (1857–1935)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davis_Jennie_Eliza, accessed [today's date]).

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