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The Davises of Mount Carmel and the Davis Years, 1905 to 1916

The Davises of Mount Carmel

Harriet Parrish’s first husband came from a Welsh family at Mount Carmel, in Northumberland County. His parents, David Davis and Ann C. Clatworthy, were both born in 1851, David in Wales. By the family’s account both left Cardiff as children in 1863 and married in 1871. The 1900 census gives David’s arrival as 1865, which supports a crossing in the 1860s, and 1863 is probably right. In 1880 both were entered as unable to read or write. That year the household at Mount Carmel held David, 29, Ann, 28, four children and David’s sister Maria, 16. By 1900 they lived at Natalie, in Mount Carmel Township, with six more.

Lillian was widowed in 1926 and is buried at Rolling Green Cemetery, Cumberland County. By the family’s account Robert was buried at Mount Carmel. The same account names a Dolphin, who lived, worked, died and was buried at Mount Carmel near his father, and a “Gladys Winifred,” who married a Bowe and was a graduate nurse at Bethlehem. No census lists a Dolphin. The second name is probably two sisters run together, since Gladys married a Benson and died in 1909. David Davis died on 13 January 1907, and Ann on 18 April 1939, and they are buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery.

David James Davis, the eldest child, was born on Friday, 23 May 1873, in Montour County. On Saturday, 4 June 1881, at eight years old, he went to work as a breaker boy at the Mount Carmel Colliery, and he worked at the colliery for thirty-two years, until September 1913. Breaker boys sat over the coal chutes and picked slate and rock out of the coal by hand, usually ten hours a day, six days a week. Most were between eight and twelve. In 1885, four years after David started, Pennsylvania barred children under twelve from the breakers. Beside the note of his mining work, the family Bible records the serial numbers of a pocket watch: 5669070, the case marked H.G.O., movement 46717.

David’s first wife was Annie Esther Richards, born on Friday, 31 January 1879. Their daughter, Esther Pauline Davis, was born on Friday, 1 September 1899. In 1900 David, 27, Annie Esther, 21, and their daughter, 1, lived at Mount Carmel.

The Davis Years, 1905 to 1916

On Monday, 16 October 1905, David James Davis married Harriet Adelaide Parrish at Shenandoah. He was 32 and she was 25. They had five children in six years.

Gladys’s birth certificate places her birth at Grier City, in Rush Township, Schuylkill County, and names her father as David Davis, a miner.

Esther Pauline, David’s daughter by his first marriage, married young. On 24 June 1916 an Esther Davis, born in 1899, the daughter of David Davis and Annie Richards, married Griffith Kenvin, the son of Thomas Kenvin and Mary Jones, in Schuylkill County. The marriage is probably hers. Griffith was born on 10 August 1886. He died at Mahanoy City on 1 November 1916 of a narrowing of the intestine caused by adhesions, and was buried on 3 November in the German Protestant Cemetery there. His mother, Mary Ann Jones, later Schiele (1861 to 1936), of Buck Mountain, gave the information. His certificate calls him married, so Esther was probably his widow. Esther was widowed at seventeen, four months after her wedding and three months after her father’s death. The family’s handwritten history says that “during this period or immediately after David’s death, Esther disappears from the scene”. Nothing is known of her after 1916.

The handwritten history also records that David had tried to take his life once before, in the fall of 1912, with blasting powder. On Thursday, 20 July 1916, at Grier City, he shot himself with a .38 revolver. He was 43, and he was buried at Mahanoy City on Monday, 24 July. Harriet was 36. Their son David was not yet six, and Robert was not yet five months old.