Born in Mobile, Alabama on October 16, 1837, Fred entered the world in a slave-owning family, as his father, George Davis, a merchant and cotton grower, owned two slaves in 1850.2 Perhaps surprisingly, however, his introduction to this version of American society did not lead his life in the direction such a birth suggested.
In his early years, Fred attended school in Mobile, then travelled to Maryland, where he earned a L.L.D. degree, graduating “with the highest honors as a linguist.”
He then returned to his hometown where he studied pharmacy, before his mother passed away. His father remarried and Fred continued his studies, eventually becoming a physician and surgeon, the career path he would follow for the rest of his life.3
After these years of study, he chose to pursue a military life, enlisting in the army on August 20, 1859, at Mount Vernon Arsenal near Mobile.
While there, “I was taken prisoner at Mount Vernon Arsenal Alabama with Capt. J.L. Reno U.S.A. January 4, 1861.”4 Reno, a native Virginian who remained loyal to the national government, commanded the arsenal.
This was the result of a decision by Alabama’s governor before the state had even seceded.
On the orders of Governor Andrew B. Moore, Alabama state troops took over the Mount Vernon Arsenal in Mobile County. The depot’s commander, Major Jesse L. Reno, was able to mount no resistance as twenty thousand small arms, hundreds of barrels of powder, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition fell into secessionist hands.5
At the time, the arsenal “housed the largest inventory of small arms in the State of Alabama.”6
This was three months before the war started, but South Carolina had already announced its departure from the Union and the national crisis was growing ever more tense as time passed without resolution in sight. Three more states (Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama) seceded within a week of this preemptive strike.
This preemptive strike was what led another story to proclaim Fred more informally as “among the first Yanks captured by the rebs during the late unpleasantness.”7
After his release, Fred traveled to the St. Louis Arsenal in Missouri, commanded by Major William Bell, a southern sympathizer, not an unusual sentiment in the border state of Missouri.
On April 14, 1862, Fred received an appointment as a hospital steward. At the time, he was working as a clerk, and had gray eyes, black hair, and a fair complexion. He was not a tall man, standing 5 feet 4½ inches tall.
He soon received an assignment to take charge of the military hospitals in Covington, Kentucky. He was a surgeon, holding the military rank of major, and was assigned to the staff of General Ambrose Burnside.8
His new position was an important and busy one. A hospital steward was “the druggist/chemist (pharmacist today) and the hospital administrator…If assigned to a hospital he was also the Hospital Administrator. He functioned as the clerk, the COO, and the CFO.”
The steward’s job responsibilities were varied and numerous, depending on the hospital’s needs and location.
In the hospital and acting as the pharmacist, he compounded (measured and mixed) prescriptions written in the prescription book by the surgeons, rather than just filling them from a bulk supply. He also verified that the medication was actually administered although he was usually not the person who gave it. As Hospital Administrator, he was responsible for inventory and ordering of medical supplies, hospital supplies, record keeping, and overall hospital administration. His inventory of records was never ending. It included the Steward’s Weekly Report, an enormous spread sheet manually recorded. On it were recorded weekly the number of beds, linen, clothes, dishes, and even spittoons. In the field and on the march his dispensary had to be mobile, and he learned to quickly assemble and disassemble it. Much of his time was spent in packing precious glass bottles of medications.9
During the war, Fred somehow found time to marry Margaret Caldwell in Newport on August 10, 1863.
He then continued with his military duties for several more months, until he requested a discharge from the army on March 22, 1864, a decision he explained in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
He got straight to the point: “I have the honor to apply for a discharge from the service of the U.S.”
This was because of financial problems both past and current. “In consequence of being in the army (where I have been since Aug 20 59) I have lost all the property that was left to me by my Father in the city of Mobile amounting to $20,000.”
He described his new issue:
Somewhat over a year ago by the decease of a relative, I was left a fortune in Mariposa, California and which up to the present time has been cared for by my brother, who is now deceased, and it being without care is fast decrepitating.
It was an urgent situation.
“Owing to the immediate need of my presence to save my property,” he was compelled to leave the army as soon as possible to address this issue. “In view of these facts, and for the purpose of saving this second fortune, I most respectfully request, if not incompatible with the public service that I be discharged.”
After the army approved his request and discharged him, he likely headed to California to look after his money. He then moved permanently to Newport, where he started his medical practice, working first as a druggist, perhaps relying on his wartime experience as a hospital steward. As his career blossomed, he practiced allopathic medicine, the system still largely in use in much of society today. Sometimes called “western medicine,” this practice is “a system in which medical doctors and other health care professionals (such as nurses, pharmacists, and therapists) treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation, or surgery.”10
In this profession, he continued to perform public service. During his years in Newport, he held the title of District Physician of the town for several years. President Benjamin Harrison appointed him as a Medical Pension Examiner. Democrat Grover Cleveland took over the Presidency from the Republican Harrison, and he removed Fred from that board, but in 1896, another Republican, William McKinley, won control as the nation’s leader, and reinstated Fred to this board.11
The members of that board assembled every Wednesday in Covington to review cases. Two examples of Fred’s work on this board occurred when he was an examiner for the pension applications of Campbell County Civil War navy veterans Thomas Manning in 1889 and Peter Wagner three years later.12
On July 30, 1893, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the pension board that the Harrison administration had appointed four years previously had completed its term. “Be it said to their credit that their work was recognized by the Pension Department in Washington as second to none” in the nation. These examiners had looked over pension applicants from around the country and these veterans could always be “always sure of justice.” Certainly, some “soreheads” raised occasional complaints against the board, but the “Government always found them to be lies out of whole cloth.”13
One grievance concerned Fred specifically. A disgruntled claimant had complained about Fred’s work, so the Pension Board sent an examiner to investigate the matter. This examiner “made his report and the doctor has received the gratifying news of a perfect vindication,” as the accusations proved to be nothing more than “false representations and malicious charges.”
Despite that positive news, the accusations still stung, so he vowed “to do a little charging himself.” Some former soldiers “who are drawing pensions on some very flimsy pretexts” would no longer live on “easy street” as Fred planned to inform General Green B. Raum, the U.S. Commissioner of Pensions of their malfeasance.14
In addition to that board, the doctor was active in other public arenas. He joined the American Medical Association and the Campbell-Kenton County Medical Society and held the position of Newport’s City Physician from 1876 to 1884. He also found other similar roles in this city, where both his work and private lives were fair game for local newspapers, which were always looking for stories.
In early 1873, Fred delivered a talk about Ireland at Newport’s lyceum, a social organization where men met to hear lectures, sharing knowledge on a wide variety of topics.15
He had a much different experience two years later, on July 1, 1875. A local man, acting on rumors he had heard, accused Fred of “being too intimate with his wife,” a serious allegation that no husband takes lightly. Fred asked who the accuser was, and this man supplied a name, but that second man could not recall having spread such gossip and “if he had…he must have been drunk.” Fred knocked this man down, defending his reputation and honor. Fred’s buddy who had come with him wished to pick him up and knock him down again, but Fred convinced him to leave without further fisticuffs.16
Three months later, in August, a man named Henry Green Barney Coyne shot and killed a boy who was not yet thirteen years old, because the youngster was holding watermelons his brother and a friend had taken from a field on a farm where Green worked. This murder “created much excitement and indignation in that usually quiet little city.” Fred examined the corpse and found that a buckshot had penetrated the brain, causing the death. In addition to this bullet, he found forty places where other buckshot pellets had struck the boy’s body, “principally in the sides and left shoulder.”17
Green managed to escape the authorities and avoid arrest for this heinous act.
Later in the same sad month, a resident identified only as “Mr. Southgate,” found the corpse of James Mackey, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, on the ground just outside of Newport. The immediate suspicion was that his death must have been a murder, and a coroner’s inquest a few days later seemingly confirmed that assumption, with Fred’s opinion that the victim had a fractured skull leading the jury to a verdict of murder.18
The case was not settled, as Mackey’s sister and other friends were exceedingly unhappy with the way County Coroner Orville Winston handled the case. Their questions convinced the authorities to disinter Mackey’s body from its burial spot in Evergreen Cemetery for re-examination. After Dr. Ed T. Wood of Cincinnati examined the corpse in front of a group of witnesses, “it was proven beyond doubt yesterday that he was not murdered.” They found that Mackey’s skull was not broken; it had a suture in it, but not a fracture. It was intact.
Winston determined that “congestion of the brain” was the cause of death, likely referring to a stroke or other issue with blood flow in that organ.
Interestingly, Fred, who had “made the post-mortem for the coroner’s jury, and reported to the jury that the man’s skull was fractured, and that he could run his finger in it,” was invited to this autopsy, but “declined to go, though a carriage was offered him.” Did he suspect his findings would not withstand closer scrutiny? Unfortunately, he did not make any public comments on that subject.
The Enquirer did not blame him or the jury who reached the verdict of murder for this confusion. The members of the jury “had to render their verdict in accordance with the testimony of Dr. Davis, whom the Coroner employed to make the post-mortem.” The initial autopsy had happened under rushed circumstances, therefore “for haste in closing the case before it was fully investigated, the Coroner, if any one, must be held responsible.”19
After this second examination, Mackey’s body was sent for reburial in New York.20
This resolved the question of how Mackey had died, but another issue raised its ugly head. When Southgate discovered the body, $155.05 remained in the dead man’s pockets. Money, of course, often leads to trouble, as it did this time, due to what the Cincinnati Enquirer termed the “shameless conduct” of local “vultures and vampires.”
Coroner Winston took charge of the body but soon angered Mackey’s relatives and acquaintances. Instead of appointing someone to administer Mackey’s belongings, Winston contracted undertaker Matthew Betz to arrange for the care of the body and its burial. Betz charged $147 for the handling of Mackey’s remains, with a list of the various charges appearing in the Cincinnati Enquirer, letting Mackey’s family and friends see the fees. Winston paid this sum from the money found on Mackey.
Among the expenses was $25 Fred charged for “examining the head of the deceased.”
The coroner’s actions stunned the newspaper, which asked: “Why stop at $147 when it was just as easy to make it $200?” With heavy sarcasm, it declared: “Surely the modesty of this cheerful undertaker and this unfledged sawbones can not be too highly commended.”
“Isn’t the great wonder in the world that they left any thing?”
The newspaper blasted Winston for paying such an amount without question, comparing the situation to “palpable extortion.”
The deceased’s sister and her companions met with a group consisting of Newport’s mayor, Coroner Winston, the undertaker’s son, an Enquirer reporter, and others at the office of City Marshal Dave Lock, to express their anger with this largesse and the overall handling of the case. Charles Ramsey, accompanying Mackey’s sister, labeled it a “high-handed outrage” for the coroner to pay these prices.
He added: “And this item - twenty-five dollars to Dr. Davis for running his cane across the back of his head – Oh! It’s an outrage!”
Ms. Mackey was especially angry, lecturing Winston: “You sir, did not treat it with common decency. It’s an outrage,” (a popular word at this meeting) before vowing to seek legal relief.
The newspaper agreed with her view, labeling Fred and the others involved as “high-toned citizens who profited” from Mackey’s misfortune.21
This episode soon passed, and Fred’s life and work continued. On the 4th of July of 1879, he delivered a speech at a “Soldiers and Sailors” Picnic.22
His experience in the public eye included time on the Board of Examiners of Teaching in the local public schools, as Chairman of the local branch of the State Board of Health, and as Campbell County Coroner. He was also active socially, belonging to the William Nelson Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Robert Burns Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. He was a “power in politics” in the area as a staunch Republican, as well as “one of Newport's most highly esteemed and prominent physicians.”23
In the summer of 1880, another case required Fred’s talents. William Kohrs and his wife had boarded their horse and wagon to drive to Newport to sell produce from their farm. On their way home, they stopped at a saloon on Sixth and Monmouth Streets to water their horses. One of the animals, reputed to be a “wild one,” somehow escaped from his bridle, then “became unmanageable and started to run off, pulling the wagon around the corner and upsetting it.” This sudden and unexpected jostling threw Mrs. Kohrs off the wagon, and the vehicle ran over her. It dragged her for half a block before the horses finally stopped. Witnesses extracted her from the “perilous position” and carried her to a nearby home.
Fred, along with Dr. Jean Jeançon, another Civil War veteran, arrived on the scene and examined the victim. They found that she had suffered badly, with a concussion, a severe spinal injury, a fractured nose, an “ugly scalp wound several inches in length,” and, finally a “frightful laceration of the skin on her face.”
The doctors did their best to reduce her pain but determined that “there were small chances for her recovery.”24
Early 1883 found Fred’s name in the local media for both social and professional reasons. In January, he attended an opera but took a rope ladder with him because for some unknown reason he was “afraid that a fire would break out.” Even once there, he was not overly pleased, “the singing affected him as though he was listening to his own death sentence,” a line the event organizers certainly did not use in their advertising.25
Just weeks later, as Newport endured another in a series of flood in this decade, a “distressing incident” occurred. A family seeking drier refuge was moving a two-month-old infant into a small boat when the child “fell and sustained a double hernia.” Fortunately, Fred was able to help, and the child was doing better, being “comfortable” when this report was published.26
In the winter of the following year, as yet one more flood ravaged the city, a local family, the Lohmans, was in distress, being out of basic supplies. The mother was dying of consumption, quickly nearing her end, and her children were “thinly clad and had no shoes.” Fred, along with Charles Solar, a fireman and Civil War veteran, took a “bountiful supply of coal and provisions” to the family.27
Months afterwards, a shocking incident occurred in Newport during the overnight hours of November 13, 1884, when burglars broke into a grocery store that John Lock Jr. owned and operated on the corner of Monmouth and Eighth Streets. Newport police officers James Edgar and John McCloud were patrolling the area on their usual beat and discovered the crime in progress. As they attempted to stop it, a gunfight ensued and one of the criminals shot Edgar, a former Civil War soldier. Fred and Dr. Frederick Locke, another Civil War veteran, soon arrived to examine the victim, trying to locate and remove the bullet, but did not find it.28
After struggling to survive, Edgar passed away on November 16. Fred and a medical colleague performed a postmortem on the corpse and determined that the bullet that killed Edgar was fired by one of the criminals, not by Officer McCloud, a relief to Police Chief Dave Lock. The Chief had feared that Edgar had been accidentally shot by his partner, but the bullet found was a smaller caliber than those the officers used.29
January of 1891 found Fred investigating a strange situation. Residents noticed a skeleton of a man behind Wiedemann’s Malt House in Newport. Fred, working with Police Chief Thomas Cottingham, visited the gruesome scene, where “all the parts of the body of man” covered the ground. On an arm bone and the thigh, were “several ligaments and in other places were pieces of flesh.” That was not all. “The top of the skull was sawed off and one of the ankles was found perfectly dissected.” It was a grotesque sight
Fred knew that a medical student had recently been in Newport and suspected this person had “used the place as a dissecting room” but had gone to Cincinnati. Investigators planned to have the student brought before local officials including Fred. They were to meet with neighborhood residents as well, but no further update appeared in the local newspapers.30
Six months later, a local business exhibited a disturbing piece of Fred’s personal collection, “the thigh bone of an Indian that was exhumed” recently from an old graveyard that Newport’s founder, General James Taylor, had used. The bone was “almost a light as a dry sponge,” though it was “exceedingly large.” Fred had inspected it thoroughly and the consensus was that it had been buried for 200 years.31
“A sad and deplorable accidental death” happened in Newport on September 7, 1891. A boy known as Little Joe Sahner had left his house that morning, but did not come home for hours, worrying his mom. She and others went to look for him and sadly found his body floating in water in a vault being constructed in an empty lot. Fred studied this sad story and ruled it to be an accidental drowning.32
At the start of 1892, the Cincinnati Enquirer reviewed the work of Newport’s public officials in the previous year. It found that Fred had conducted 50 inquests in 1891, examining 15 deaths due to heart disease, one suicide by poisoning, seven accidental deaths, two murders, and several more of various causes.33
In March of this new year, a man stole food from Fred’s house but only received a suspended sentence of $10 plus court costs because the kind-hearted and forgiving Fred declined to press charges.34
On at least one occasion, Fred needed his own expertise to treat himself. One day, he “accidentally ran against the corner of his desk, bruising his flesh” and creating an abscess in his right thigh. It hurt badly for a while but was not a serious long-term concern.35
On June 15, still in this busy 1892, the Shortway Bridge, under construction over the Licking River between Newport and Covington, collapsed, killing over 20 people and injuring others. Fred, as Campbell County Coroner, visited the scene and worked with other officials to find and identify bodies stuck in the rubble of the disaster.
He also was part of the team in charge of finding out why the bridge collapsed. He worked alongside Kenton County’s coroner M.C. Wilson, and they determined that rails on the bridge had spread apart, causing the traveler - a machine used in the bridge’s construction, and which was moving along those rails - to jump off its track. This led to the collapse of one section of the bridge, which caused the rest of the bridge to fall as well.36
His work on this tragedy garnered positive attention. On June 18, the Cincinnati Enquirer felt it “just to give some credit to the foremost workers who have heretofore been omitted” in the paper’s coverage of this “great disaster.” It was “through an inadvertency” that the paper had not recognized such fine work.
All of the bridge employees who are alive and the relatives and the friends of the dead are loud in their praise of the wonderful work, kind and courteous treatment of Coroner Dr. Fred A. Davis. He performed his duty bravely and nobly and displayed his excellent and humane character.37
Fred also served as a director of the Newport branch of the Covenant Building and Loan Association of Knoxville, TN.38
The public spotlight found him again in 1897 when he was a witness in the county’s most notorious criminal case, the murder trials of Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling. These two men were on trial for the murder and beheading of Pearl Bryan, a young, pregnant Indiana woman whose headless corpse had turned up in Fort Thomas in early 1896. This case was the “crime of the century” in Campbell County and remains the most famous crime in county history many years later. Fred was a witness for the defense in these legal contests, which ended with both men being convicted and then publicly hanged, the last public executions in county history. His testimony included a statement that he had been in Newport for the past twenty-eight years.39
As the end of 1898 approached, Fred’s family suffered a sad loss when his granddaughter Eleanor, just nine months old, died after a brief illness. Complications from diphtheria, a bacterial infection of the nose and throat, were responsible for her death.40
Winter weather caused him an issue early in January of 1901. He exited his house one day only to step on a patch of ice and fall to the ground. “His head struck on a sharp-pointed granite block,” a painful blow that left a bad gash at the base of his brain. He received four stitches,” but was fortunate that “no evil effects are now feared.”41
Fred recovered from that accident, but two years later fell ill and passed away on June 24, 1903, at the home of a friend in Ohio. He had struggled with his health for some time, leading to an operation in Philadelphia weeks previously. He had initially appeared to be well on his way to recovery following the procedure, but, while he was at his friend’s house, his sister, Mother Angeline, the Superior of a Catholic order, passed away, adding more stress to his already struggling constitution. His heart failed him soon thereafter.42
His funeral took place at his home on York Street in Newport, officiated by Reverend J.P. Whitehead of the First Presbyterian Church. Plans were for it to be “of the simplest character and strictly private, in accordance with the wishes of the family,” but a report after the ceremony noted: “The funeral was a large one and there were many beautiful floral pieces. A number of citizens attended the ceremonies to pay their respect to the honored dead.”43
In medicine, Fred had been “one of the oldest practitioners of the city at the time of his death.” He was a man of “high attainments and an extraordinary will power,” being “big-hearted and charitable, always ready to aid those in distress and need.” While providing aid, he “never looked for any remuneration” from the unfortunate souls who needed his help. “He enjoyed the respect and confidence of all who knew him.”44
Among his pallbearers was Dr. Locke, who would himself pass away less than three months later.
One of Fred’s sons, Leslie, was serving on a navy cruiser when Fred died but was able to return home to attend the funeral. Fred also left behind his widow Margaret, two adult daughters, and three other grown sons.45
He was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery, where Margaret would join him a dozen years later.
1Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903
2Ibid
3Ibid
4Fred A. Davis. Cincinnati., to Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War. March 22, 1864. Accessed on fold3.com
5htttps://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/35343, Accessed October 2, 2022
6https://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/mtvernonarsenal.html
7Cincinnati Enquirer, March 3, 1881
8Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903, and Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1903, and Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1903
9https://www.civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/steward1/, Accessed October 1, 2022
10https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/allopathic-medicine, Accessed January 18, 2025
11Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903
12Cincinnati Enquirer, March 3, 1892
13Cincinnati Enquirer, July 30, 1893
14Cincinnati Enquirer, January 10, 1892
15Cincinnati Enquirer, February 10, 1873
16Cincinnati Enquirer, July 2, 1875
17Cincinnati Enquirer, August 8 and 9, 1877
18Cincinnati Enquirer, August 21, 1877
19Cincinnati Enquirer, August 28, 1877
20Cincinnati Enquirer, August 28, 1877
21Cincinnati Enquirer, August 27, 1877
23Cincinnati Enquirer, July 4, 1879
23Kentucky Post, June 25, 1903, Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1903, and Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903
24Cincinnati Enquirer, August 20, 1880
25The Penny Press [Cincinnati]. January 30, 1883
26Cincinnati Enquirer, February 16, 1883
27Cincinnati Enquirer, February 10, 1884
28Cincinnati Enquirer, November 14, 1884
29Cincinnati Enquirer, November 17, 1884. Dave/David Lock was a Civil War veteran, the brother of Dr. Frederick Locke and of John Lock, who owned the store where Officer James Edgar was shot and the farm where Pearl Bryan’s corpse was found.
30Cincinnati Enquirer, January 7, 1891
31Cincinnati Enquirer, July 19, 1891
32Cincinnati Enquirer, September 8, 1891
33Cincinnati Enquirer, January 1, 1892
34Cincinnati Enquirer, March 5, 1892
35Cincinnati Enquirer, March 14, 1892
36Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, July 23, 1892, and Cincinnati Enquirer, July 23, 1892
37Cincinnati Enquirer, June 18, 1892
38Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, August 10, 1892
39Tippin, Larry. The Betrayal of Pearl Bryan: Trial Testimony and Depositions from the Trials of Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling. CD
40Cincinnati Enquirer, November 15, 1898
41Cincinnati Enquirer, January 2, 1901
42Kentucky Post, June 24, 1903, and Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903
43Kentucky Post, June 26, 1903, and Kentucky Post, June 27, 1903
44Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 25, 1903, and Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1903
45Ibid and Kentucky Post, June 25, 1903
