DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm going to do it justice. Now, before we even get to the house itself, you have to understand where this family came from — because the Davis name in Fort Bend County carries a story that starts with a fistful of beans and a man's life hanging in the balance. Back in 1842, during a conflict with Mexico, a group of Texans faced one of the most harrowing ordeals you can imagine.
They were made to draw beans from a container. White bean, you live. Black bean, you die.
Kinchen Davis reached in — and pulled white. That man walked away from that ordeal, went on to raise a family, and one of his sons was John H. Davis, born in 1851.
Now J. H. Davis — that's the man who built this house — he was not the kind of fellow who sat quietly on the porch.
Fort Bend County in the 1880s was a powder keg. The Jaybird-Woodpecker War, they called it, and it was exactly as dangerous as the name suggests. Davis was a Jaybird leader, and here's what the record credits him with: he prevented lynchings during that conflict.
Not one. Lynchings, plural. In an era when that kind of intervention could cost a man everything, J.
H. Davis stood in the way. Around 1880 — right in the thick of those turbulent years — Davis built this house.
Cypress and white pine, the marker tells us, with fine details that were genuinely unusual for its era. This wasn't a man building a rough frontier shelter. This was a man with land, with livestock, with standing, putting something lasting into the earth of Fort Bend County.
Davis lived until 1927. And the house he built outlasted him, the way good things do. In 1947, it was given to Polly Ryon Memorial Hospital — named, as it happens, for Davis's own mother-in-law.
So what you have here is a cypress-and-pine house that holds three generations of consequence: a father who cheated death by the luck of a white bean, a son who spent his life trying to keep others from dying by violence, and a building that ended up in the care of a hospital bearing the name of family. Fort Bend County doesn't give up its stories easy — but sometimes a house will tell you everything, if you know to ask.
What the marker says
Built by son of Kinchen Davis, who escaped death by drawing a white bean in famous ordeal of Texans in 1842 Mexican conflict. As a "Jaybird" leader, builder J. H. Davis (1851-1927), prevented lynchings in Jaybird-Woodpecker War of the 1880s. He was owner of much land and livestock. This house, built about 1880, is of cypress and white pine, with many fine details unusual in its era. It was given in 1947 to Polly Ryon Memorial Hospital, named for Davis' mother-in-law. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1962