3. Sarah Nisbet and the Road West

Among those most anxious to move west was Sarah Nisbet Davis. Family lore has it that before she agreed to marry Israel Pickens Davis in 1803 she made him promise to make her a new home on the frontier. It took awhile to keep that promise, but 23 years and 11 children later, Israel was ready to move. He arranged to sell his farm, and in 1826 he and a preacher friend, Rev. Peoples, headed west in search of a new home. They stopped first in Maury County, Tennessee, where some friends from back home had already settled. They rode on as far as Chicasaw Bluffs, overlooking the Mississippi, where a few years earlier Andy Jackson and his business partners had founded Memphis. They turned around and headed home to get their families, but Israel never made it. He fell suddenly ill during another visit with their friends in Maury County and died.

Sarah Nisbet Davis stands out as the strongest woman in this family narrative. She took over the farm and made it a success. She raised her 11 children, and made decisions for them. She decided Robert G., her fourth child, was too delicate for farm work, so she sent him to school and apprenticed him to a tailor. She was the matriarch of a large family, and she insisted it was her job to name each of her grandchildren.

When she finally settled Israel’s estate, it was worth a tidy $4,800 – more than $136,000 today. Sarah split it equally among the children, with an identical share for herself. Each share was enough to buy 600 acres out west, for the West still beckoned. By 1837, two of Sarah’s sons had already moved to Maury County. Her oldest daughter and husband had left for northern Mississippi, settling on land the Choctaws had evacuated after Jackson negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Other friends and relations had moved to Oxford, Mississippi, on land ceded by the Chicasaws under the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek. “The results of these two Indian treaties cannot be overestimated in our family history,” Hattie Bell wrote.

Sarah’s son, Robert G., married Margaret Nelson, from just over the South Carolina line, and her daughter, also named Sarah, married Margaret’s bother, William Nelson. Robert and William, double brothers-in-law, became the best of friends and vowed to move west together – and to take mother Sarah with them.

The Davises and Nelsons went first to Maury County, Tennessee, where they may have stayed for a year or more. The moved on to Lafayette County, Mississippi – the area around Oxford, where we find them in 1841, when a son, James Harvey Davis, was born. That was the year the Mississippi Legislature voted to make Oxford the site of the state university. One can imagine the excitement at this news around Oxford, a town founded and named with the idea that it would become a center for education in what was then the wild Southwest. That atmosphere may have influenced the Davises, especially Robert G. and his sons, James Harvey – who became one of the first students at Ole Miss, and Robert Calvin Grier Davis, who was born in Oxford in 1850. Land had long been a Davis goal, but education increasingly became a priority.

The Davises and Nelsons stayed in Lafayette County for 20 years, and seem to have prospered. They had a home near Shiloh ARP Church – Robert G. sold five acres next to the church for a graveyard. They had a farm and a sawmill, and Robert G. was a successful tailor. But in 1859, the families packed up and moved west again, across the Mississippi River to Arkansas. Hattie Bell can only speculate as to what motivated this move: They may have wished to avoid the war then on the horizon; they may have run out of good timber for the sawmill; there may have been a dispute in the church. Far as anyone knows, no journals or correspondence exist documenting their reasoning.

Whatever the reason, the Davises sold their property in Mississippi and bought land in southern Arkansas. They had had a bad experience with mosquitoes in the Mississippi floodplain (about which more later), so they moved inland, to hillier terrain. They bought land in Drew County, a few miles west of Monticello and east of what is now Wilmar, in heavily timbered land with rich soil. There Robert G. Davis, his double brother-in-law William Nelson and their grown children built a community they called Allis, and grandmother Sarah Nisbet Davis finally came to rest.