CHAPTER XV.
The house adjoining the Baptist church, now occupied by the Custom House, recalls next to the house on Cole’s Hill, in which I was born, the pleasantest associations, and the dearest memories. In that building my grandfather William Davis, born July 15, 1758, lived from 1781, the year of his marriage, until January 5, 1826, the date of his death. He was the son of Thos. Davis, and one of a family of one daughter and six sons, Sarah, Thomas, William, John, Samuel, Isaac P. and Wendell. Sarah, born June 29, 1754, married LeBaron Bradford of Bristol, son of William Bradford, United States senator from the state of Rhode Island.
Thomas Davis, born June 26, 1756, was a representative from Plymouth, senator from Plymouth County, senator from Suffolk County, treasurer and receiver general of the Commonwealth from 1792 to 1797, and president of the Boston Marine Insurance Company from 1799 until his death, January 21, 1805. I have on my walls the barometer which hung in the insurance office at the time of his death.
John Davis, born in Plymouth, January 25, 1761, graduated at Harvard in 1781, and entered the legal profession. He was the youngest member of the convention on the adoption of the state constitution, and in 1796 was appointed by Washington comptroller of the United States Treasury. In 1801 he was appointed by John Adams, Judge of the United States Court for the district of Massachusetts, and continued on the bench forty years. He was treasurer of Harvard College from 1810 to 1827, a Fellow of Harvard from 1803 to 1810, and President of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1818 to 1843. He died in Boston, January 14, 1847.
Samuel Davis, born March 5, 1765, was a well known antiquarian, a learned linguist, and a recognized authority on questions relating to Indian dialects. He was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, recipient of an honorary degree from Harvard in 1819, and died in Plymouth, July 10, 1829. He is worthily commemorated by the following inscription on his gravestone on Burial hill:
“From life on earth our pensive friend retires,
His dust commingling with the Pilgrim sires;
In thoughtful walks their every path he traced,
Their toils, their tombs his faithful page embraced,
Peaceful and pure and innocent as they,