Eugene Davenport was an American academic and agricultural educator, who served as the dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois (1895 - 1922).
Background
Eugene Davenport was born on June 20, 1856, on a farm near Woodland, Michigan, the only child of George Martin Davenport and Esther Sutton. His father's ancestry was English and Dutch, his mother's Pennsylvania Dutch.
The elder Davenport had grown up with little formal schooling near Ithaca, New York, and at eighteen had migrated with his family to northern Ohio. There he married the daughter of a family of spinners and weavers and abandoned his trade as a carpenter and joiner to become a farmer.
In 1855 the couple removed to a tract of their own in the southern Michigan timberland, where Eugene was born in a log house. This frontier environment and close association with his father in turning the hardwood forest into a farm strongly influenced Davenport's life. The boy's earliest recollections were of making maple sugar, and he became expert with the ax and crosscut saw.
Education
Davenport attended both public and private schools. Davenport began teaching when he reached the age of eighteen.
He attended the Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1878. Davenport then returned to the family farm and taught at a nearby private school. Davenport returned to college to obtain a Master of Science degree, graduating in 1884.
Career
Returning to the college in 1888, Davenport served for a year as assistant to Professor William J. Beal and as assistant botanist of the experiment station, and from 1889 to 1891 as professor of agriculture and superintendent of the college farm.
Davenport resigned in 1891 and went to Brazil, where he had been invited to establish and preside over an agricultural college at Piracicaba for a year, after which the state of S030 Paulo was to take it over. The undertaking, however, proved premature, and Davenport left Brazil in April 1892, returning by way of England in order to study the methods of scientific agriculture practiced at Rothamsted. Back home he resumed the life of a farmer at Woodland.
In the fall of 1894, Davenport agreed to become dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois. Arriving in Urbana on January 1, 1895, Davenport found the college in a neglected state. It had nine students and offered only a short winter course; and the recently installed president, Andrew S. Draper, opposed agricultural education.
Davenport was made professor of animal husbandry in March 1895, although Draper did not appoint instructors in agriculture proper and dairying until fifteen months later. Davenport's main battle was for funds, and to gain them he boldly went over the president's head to the farmers and politicians. He helped organize the Illinois Farmers' Institute, which in 1899 persuaded the legislature to appropriate money for an agricultural building and to see that the college received more revenue. The institute itself supplied scholarships; Davenport greatly enlarged the curriculum and appointed four new instructors; and enrollments dramatically increased.
Davenport had been appointed director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the university in 1896, and to enlist support for it he cultivated the leaders of Illinois farm organizations. He had representatives of the producers' associations lobby for categorical appropriations for research in their special areas. His success assured the college and the station ample means, but he paid a heavy price for it. The advisory committees of prominent agriculturists he established were in a position to influence research policy and require immediate results. When they demanded the firing of the head of the household science department, Isabel Bevier, Davenport sacrificed principle to expediency and asked for her resignation.
Well before the First World War, Davenport had firmly established the College of Agriculture and the Experiment Station among the leading institutions of their kind. Through extension services in agriculture and home economics he linked the state with the university.
Davenport was much in demand as a public speaker. He issued many technical bulletins, wrote prolifically on farm problems and national affairs for periodicals, and published a textbook, Principles of Breeding (1907), and an abbreviated version, Domesticated Animals and Plants (1910). In Education for Efficiency (1909) he argued for including agriculture and home economics as integral parts of the public school system.
During the First World War he advised the federal government on food policy. Davenport used his political allies to support the university's general needs, and from 1920 through 1922 he served as vice-president of the university as well as dean of the agricultural college.
Upon retiring in 1922, Davenport returned to Woodland. The deaths of his daughter (1930) and his wife (1935) saddened his later years. He spent his remaining days completing Timberland Times (1950), a charming memoir of pioneer days in Michigan, and writing a rambling autobiography, which was never published. Eugene Davenport died on March 31, 1941, at his Woodland home, of nephritis; he was buried in Woodland Memorial Park.
Achievements
Eugene Davenport has been listed as a noteworthy agriculturist by Marquis Who's Who.
Religion
Eugene Davenport grew up favoring Universalist beliefs but became a Congregationalist.
Politics
A man of decided opinions, Eugene Davenport was a staunch Republican.
Views
Eugene Davenport believed in hard work, thrift, and self-reliance, and in the blessings of civil and religious liberty.
Personality
Personally abstemious, Eugene Davenport abhorred cigarettes and alcohol; at the Michigan ratification convention in 1933, he was the only delegate to oppose repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Rather short but imposing in physical appearance, Eugene Davenport had a high forehead and trim whiskers that framed regular features. Although ambitious and self-willed, he could indirectly call out the best effort in others.
Connections
On November 2, 1881, Eugene Davenport married Emma Jane Coats. They had two daughters, Dorothy and Margaret, of whom the first died shortly after birth.
Father:
George Martin Davenport
Mother:
Esther (Sutton) Davenport
Wife:
Emma Jane Davenport (Coats)
Daughter:
Dorothy Davenport
Dorothy Davenport died in infancy.
Daughter:
Margaret Davenport
colleague:
William James Beal
William James Beal was an American botanist, who was a pioneer in the development of hybrid corn and the founder of the W. J. Beal Botanical Garden.
