Emma Davis
UF 118A
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEWER: EMILY RING
PLACE OF INTERVIEW: GAINESVILLE
DATE OF INTERVIEW: February 2, 1982
Emma Davis was born on February 12, 1909 in Mansfield, Louisiana to
Jarrell Dean Adcock, a Baptist minister, and Frances Adcock. Mrs. Davis
moved with her family to Nicholasville, Kentucky in 1911, then Tallahassee,
Florida in 1912, and to Orlando, Florida in 1919. Mrs. Davis finished her
secondary schooling in Orlando. She recalls the city at that time had only
ten thousand people.
Following graduation from high school, she attended Coker College in
Hartsville, South Carolina, a small Baptist college. She majored in math,
minored in biology, and played the piano for four years. While at Coker she
met John Davis, her future husband. Davis earned his Ph.D. in Ecology at
the University of Chicago and was teaching at Presbyterian College of South
Carolina in Clinton, South Carolina. The two lived in Clinton for four
years and then moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1936 when Mr. Davis took a
teaching position at Southwestern College. They then moved to Florida in
1941 and Mr. Davis took a teaching position at the University of Florida in
1946.
In the rest of the interview Mrs. Davis discusses her years with her
husband at the University and their travels together. Her husband obtained
grants to do research in Burma, New Zealand, and Taiwan, and the two spent
several years in these places. Mrs. Davis has remained active since her
husband's death in 1978. She has taken trips abroad, and she continues to
be active in the social affairs of Gainesville. Sh has two children;
Virginia, born in 1932, and Susan, born in 1934.