This endowment honors its namesake, Jane Crayton Davis, a devoted friend and supporter of the South Caroliniana Library who is active in local historical pursuits in her home county of Aiken, South Carolina, and on a statewide level. Having served as President of the South Carolina Confederation of Local Historical Societies and as President of the University South Caroliniana Society, Mrs. Davis is keenly aware of the obligation of the library to preserve the historical documents of our state. Mrs. Davis was honored by the Confederation of South Carolina Local Historical Societies when she received the its 2006 Robert N. Pryor Volunteer Award for her lifetime commitment to preserving South Carolina's local and state history.

The Jane Crayton Davis Preservation Endowment has been used to assist with the restoration of a badly damaged nineteenth-century oil portrait of Eliza Legare Bryan and to fully conserve a plantation journal of low country South Carolina rice planter Davison McDowell.

Eliza Legare Bryan portrait

Danish artist Peter Copmann (1794-1850), who worked for a time in Charleston, South Carolina, painted this portrait of Eliza Catherine Legare Bryan (1794-1842) around 1835. A daughter of Mary Swinton and Solomon Legare and the sister of Hugh Swinton Legare, Eliza was married in 1810 to John Bryan, son of Lydia Ball and John Bryan. Eliza and John were the parents of twenty-one children, thirteen of whom survived infancy.

The plantation journal of Davison McDowell (1783-1842) dates from 1815 to 1833 and documents life at Asylum plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina, with planting and crop records for McDowell's rice and the subsistence crops that feed his enslaved labor force.

McDowell journal (before conservation)	McDowell journal (after conservation)

The volume also contains a record of weather observations, seasonal household moves between the plantation, the seashore, and various other properties, and information on the planter's slave holdings, including yearly lists of slaves and records of slave "crimes and misdemeanors."

To view the University South Caroliniana Society's annual report detailing the gift of the Davison McDowell plantation journal, 1815-1833, please visit http://www.sc.edu/library/socar/uscs/1996/mcdowe96.htm.

To donate to this fund and for additional information, please contact the University Libraries Development Office at (803) 777-5564 or visit http://www.sc.edu/library/develop/cu.html.

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