03/20/2025
For National Women's Month, we have been digging up some prominent women from Warren County.
Our first but certainly not our last post on this subject will be on the ever so humble, Mrs. Elizabeth Brown Davis, the renowned Astronomer.
Davis was born in Front Royal, Virginia, 1863, daughter of Victor Brown and Millie Jacobs, and granddaughter of Dr. Anderton Brown who lived and worked out of the Trout-Brown Home on 29 Chester Street. Her father met and married neighbor, Mollie Jacobs, and they moved into 101 Chester Street which is now the Ivy Lodge for the Warren Heritage Society. Historian Laura Virginia Hale writes in “On Chester Street…” that little golden-haired Lizzie Brown was “introduced to astronomy as a girl studying the heavens through a telescope in the middle of Chester Street.” Little did the world know, that this little girl would grow up to become one of the greatest women in astronomical mathematics.
Shortly after her father’s untimely death in 1865, Elizabeth’s mother took Lizzie along with her sister to Washington D.C to further Lizzie’s education. She graduated from Columbian University (now George Washington University) with a bachelor’s degree. Certainly a woman ahead of her time, she continued her education at Johns Hopkins University in mathematics by special permission of the faculty but was unable to receive a higher degree. However, fate had greater plans for Mrs. Brown. A quote from a genealogist of the family: “She went in for higher mathematics in a professional way several years after her marriage (Arthur Powell Davis), being assigned by Professor Simon Newcomb, head of the Naval Observatory, to the work for computing the ephemeris of the sun for each day of each year and published for years in advance in the Nautical Almanac."
In a write up from the Spokane Press in 1907 titled “With Baby in Lap she calculates sun guide for every American Battleship” Elizabeth calculated the position of the sun and planets for the year 1912. Why so far in advance from 1907 you may ask? Because battleships often go on cruises that can last three years before their return to port at home. Every ephemeris, a book that tracks all the projected planet and start trajectory, required precise calculations that involved astronomical mathematics, trigonometry, calculus and the use of special tables which were helped prepared by Professor Simon Newcomb. Well long before the modern day computer, every American Battleship depended on these mathematical calculations made by Elizabeth Brown Davis as they traveled the high seas.
As important as this job was, Elizabeth, now a mother of four daughters, replied in an interview, “But don’t forget that my husband is A.P. Davis, one of the principal engineers of the U.S. Reclamation Service and very well known in the West. I AM the wife of Mr. Davis; he is not the husband of Elizabeth Brown Davis.”
We will continue posting and sharing other women from Warren County who had both great and even small rippling effects in our Nation's History.
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The Warren Heritage Society and Laura Virginia Hale Archives will be opening back up to the public on April 2nd. Please check out our website for more information at warrenheritagesociety.org
Article from the Spokane Press, June 20, 1907.
