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Born: March 26, 1843
Edgefield, SCDied: October 23, 1921
Chattanooga, TNMarried: Benjamin F. Davis
February 3, 1876 — Wartrace, TNChildren:
Frances Eudora Davis Allen
Benjamin F. Davis, II
Gertrude Davis (died at birth)
Sarah Blanche Davis Howard LynnSiblings:
Sarah, Mary, Robert, Martha, Elizabeth, Tyre,
Half-Siblings: Richard, Julia, John, Emma, ThomasParents:
Susanna Newton and Hasting Jennings
Margaret was born into a life of wealth and priviledge in the Edgefield District of South Carolina. She was the sixth of seven children born to Hasting Jennings and his first wife, Susanna Newton Jennings.
Her father, described after his death as a "student and a dreamer," suffered a number of financial reverses. By the 1850s, he sold their remaining holdings in SC and moved the family to Georgia. Maggie's mother, Susanna, died soon after that.
Maggie had a number of brothers and sisters, as her father married several times. Her father's second wife was Nancy Anna (maiden name unknown); their children were Richard, Julia, John and Emma. The youngest son, Thomas, was born to Hasting and his third wife, Sarah Elizabeth (maiden name unknown).
Throughout her life, Margaret wrote poetry; through one of her poems, I know that her younger brother, R. Tyre Jennings, died at age 16 in a hospital in Lynchburg, Virginia, of typhus, during the Civil War. She provides the date of his death in the poem and mentions, too, that her mother was no longer living. Tyre is buried in the Confederate section of the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg; it was Margaret's poem which provided the clue that allowed me to locate his grave.
I have assumed that the unmarried daughters of Hasting Jenning's first marriage may not have gotten along well with his second wife. The 1860 census shows the teenage daughters, Elizabeth (age 18) and Margaret (age 16) Jennings, living with their oldest sister, Sarah “Sallie” Jennings Healan and her family in LaFayette, Walker County, GA. The same census shows their younger brother, Tyre, living with his father, Hasting, and his second wife and their first child. The only photo of Tyre Jennings, taken about 1861, shows him wearing the uniform of a military academy, and so I suspect that he boarded at school most of the year.
Margaret was well educated, both at Mary Sharp College, Winchester, Tennessee, and at Louisville Female College, Louisville, Kentucky. A teacher, she lived with relatives and taught in LaFayette, GA, following the Civil War. The 1870 census shows her living with a sister, Martha “Mattie” Jennings Fulmer and her children. Later, she moved to Wartrace, Tennessee, she met and married my great-grandfather, Ben Davis.
Margaret was not the only one in her family to find her way to middle Tennessee. Her oldest sister, Sarah Jennings Healan, moved to Wartrace with her family as well, and operated a boarding house and hotel, Healan House, for some years. Their brother, Robert William "Will" Jennings, lived in Nashville. And a niece, Lillian Shealy, married Sidney Houston, also of Wartrace, TN. Sarah Jennings Healan's biography is found on the family history site of her great-granddaughter, Healan Barrow.
My great-grandparents, Margaret and Ben Davis, were married less than six years when he died, leaving her with three very small children. My grandmother, the youngest, was only 7 months old at that time. Although in seriously reduced financial circumstances, Margaret saw that they had the best education she could provide, and supplemented their training at home.
What is known is that, following Ben's death, Maggie sold their large home and bought, instead, three small homes. The family enlarged the middle home and lived there, renting out the two other residences. Evidently, this never provided the income they hoped it would. Many years later, all three of their children said they were very poor while growing up.
The last seven years of Maggie's life, she lived with my grandmother, Blanche Davis Howard, and her family, in Chattanooga, TN. My mother used to say that she was her grandmother's last pupil, as Margaret taught her to read when she was four years old.
Margaret is interred in Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga, TN, between the graves of her two sons-in law, Thompson Allen and Fred Howard.
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