[Waco, Texas: 1913].
Sold
Softcover. First edition. 12mo. Photo-illustrated stapled wrappers. [8]pp. Very good, front wrap detached and nicked at the corners and with some faint spotting on the rear wrap. Brief memoir of Eliza L. Davis, an American missionary born to former slave parents in Bastrop County, Texas published shortly before her journey to Africa, and likely as a fundraiser for her travel. Davis was a graduate of Guadalupe College in Seguin, Texas, earning a teaching certificate before going on to Central Texas College in Waco in 1905. The pamphlet charts her early life, conversion, her family's decision to help her pursue higher education, the various challenges she faced, the vision she witnessed at church, and a concluding a 12-stanza poem, "A Call to Duty." Davis fulfilled her destiny the same year as this pamphlet when she, along with eight others, boarded a ship bound for Monrovia, Liberia in December. She would spend nearly six decades there, marrying a British missionary doctor in 1919 and together adopting three children. While her husband died in 1939 she continued to do the Lord's work, opening schools for children, founding churches, and serving as an evangelist and teacher. Davis only returned to the U.S. in 1972 due to poor health settling in Tyler, Texas where she died in 1980. A rare memoir. *OCLC* locates no copies; not in *The Catalog of the Blockson Collection* or *Work*.
Item #440440
