The Davis Home, Waterford, Washington County, Ohio — c. 1925

The single surviving photograph of the Waterford, Ohio home where Dorothy Marie Davis was born on 24 February 1925 to Homer Davis and Bessie Hill Davis. A one-and-a-half-story frame house with a covered porch fronting the road; a single mature tree, branches reaching almost the full width of the lot, dominates the foreground. Robert Earl’s typed caption beneath the print reads simply: “Home in Waterford, Washington County, Ohio where Dorothy Marie Davis was born.”

What it documents

The Davis household lived in Waterford for the early years of the three sisters’ childhoods — Mary (b. 1924), Dorothy (b. 1925), and Betty (b. 1926) — before moving a few miles south to Unionville, where the house caught fire and burned to the ground. The Waterford print is the only existing photograph in the archive of the earlier Davis address, before the fire. The whole Unionville fire account Robert Earl wrote into the 1990 Heritage sits a few pages later in the same document — the two are paired in the original layout as a small before-and-after of the Davis-side childhood.

The photograph is one of three Davis-side images Robert Earl chose to reproduce in the Heritage: the birth certificate, this house, and the three sisters as small children that comes next.

Source: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990 — Davis section.