Written by Sarah Davis, Illinois State Museum Educator of Public Programs 

Born in 1814, Sarah Walker Davis was one of nine children born to Lucy Adam and William Perrin Walker, a Massachusetts Probate Judge. She attended the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. The school was founded by Harriet Beecher and was one of the first educational institutions for women. Davis met her husband, David Davis, through a friend of her fathers’. In 1839, Davis and her husband moved from Massachusetts to the small village of Bloomington, Illinois. Davis made a home for her family, supported her husband’s career as he went from a circuit-riding lawyer to a U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice and U.S. Senator.  

As the family acquired more wealth, Davis helped the town grow and became part of local social clubs and organizations. In the late 1860s, she decided to stay in Bloomington instead of following her husband to Washington, D.C., when he became a U.S. Senator. It was then that she helped design the mansion now known as the David Davis State Historic Site. She died in 1879.