If you drive Highway 18 through Manila, Arkansas, you’ll pass a tall granite spire with a life-sized soldier standing in front of it. Plenty of people never pull over. The man buried behind that statue was a 5-foot-3 duck hunter from Big Lake who came home from France with top medals from two countries, and his own neighbors didn’t know it.
A boy from Big Lake
Herman Davis was born on January 3, 1888, at Big Lake Island, the settlement that later became Manila, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. (The 1995 National Register nomination for his memorial gives January 2 in one place, but the monument itself says January 3.) His parents, Jeff and Mary Ann Davis, ran a little country store and got by on hunting, fishing and some farming.
His father died while Herman was in the fourth grade, and Herman quit school to help support the family. While still young, probably in his teens, he was guiding sportsmen who came over from Blytheville.
Big Lake was created by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812, which turned a free-flowing river into lake and swamp. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says winter waterfowl numbers there can still top 200,000 birds.
The market-hunting era
After the Civil War, railroads came into northeast Arkansas for timber. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the same trains carried the market hunters’ kill north: iced barrels of venison, ducks, fish and even frogs for restaurants in other states. Wealthy sportsmen, mostly from St. Louis, leased up hunting land, and the fights with locals from the mid-1870s to 1915 are remembered as the Big Lake Wars.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas and the National Register nomination both say he and his cousin James Davis reportedly killed as many as 400 ducks a day and shipped them to northern markets, where they got about a dollar a duck. That’s a reported figure, not a kept count.
The laws were catching up fast. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal offense to ship illegally taken game across state lines. The Weeks-McLean Act of 1913 banned spring shooting of migratory birds, though courts soon ruled it unconstitutional. After a 1916 treaty with Great Britain (for Canada), Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. That law made it a crime to “pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill” or “sell” a migratory bird, and Ducks Unlimited notes that most market hunting died out quickly after it.
Closer to home, President Woodrow Wilson made Big Lake a federal bird reserve on August 2, 1915, the same year Arkansas created its Game and Fish Commission. The life Herman grew up in was ending about the time the Army came for him.
Too small, then drafted
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says he was first rejected for military service because of his 5-foot-3 frame. One later account says instead that he claimed an exemption for his size and age, so the exact story isn’t settled. Either way, he was drafted and inducted at Blytheville on March 4, 1918. (The bronze plaque on his monument says he “enlisted” March 14, 1918, a small conflict in the record.) He was 30 years old.
He had been married, and he had a young son. The encyclopedia says his mother looked after the boy while he was away.
He trained at Camp Pike near Little Rock, about 90 days by the National Register’s count, and sailed for France on June 15, 1918, with Company I of the 113th Infantry. The 113th was part of the 29th “Blue and Gray” Division, built from National Guard units from New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The division’s 1921 history says its largest batches of draftees, men from all over the country, arrived about three weeks before it sailed, which is probably how an Arkansas draftee ended up in a New Jersey regiment.
According to the National Register nomination, Davis served in the Center Sector in Haute-Alsace from late July to late September 1918, then went into the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October.
Molleville Farm: what’s documented
On October 8, 1918, the 29th Division attacked the heights east of the Meuse River, north of Verdun. The American Battle Monuments Commission’s guide describes days of hard fighting through the woods and ravines around Molleville Farm. Historian Jimmy Price calls the farm “an awful death trap” that wasn’t finally taken until mid-October.
Herman Davis’s Distinguished Service Cross citation, printed in War Department General Orders No. 46 (1919) and in the division’s own history, is the most solid account of what he did. It reads in part:
“On duty as a company runner, Private Davis was accompanying the left assault platoon of his company during the advance through the woods, when it was fired on by an enemy machine gun. As soon as the gun opened fire the members of the platoon scattered and attempted to flank the gun, but Private Davis pushed on ahead, being the first to reach the nest, attacked it single handed, and killed the four enemy gunners. His gallant act enabled his platoon to continue the advance.”
A version that ran in newspapers in April 1919 adds that he “captured the gun.” The 29th Division’s history lists him among the men decorated in its General Orders No. 14 of April 20, 1919.
The National Register nomination fills in the usual telling: Davis crawled forward on his own to about 50 yards from the gun, which sat on a hilltop, and picked off the four Germans one at a time. It also says an officer from another company saw the attack and recommended him for recognition.
Even this action has more than one version. Arkansas Road Stories notes that Davis rarely spoke of it, and that a friend’s account of what he said (shooting the crew one at a time from about 50 yards) doesn’t fully match the citation. Every account agrees he took out that gun crew alone.
The other stories: legend or fact?
Several more stories get told about Davis, and they’re much harder to pin down than the citation.
- The dugout. The National Register nomination says that after getting separated from his comrades, Davis came on a German dugout and shot the men as they came out, “killing 11 in all.” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas also gives eleven. Another account puts the number at fifteen.
- Another machine gun nest. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says he was credited with killing fifteen gunners in a machine gun nest in a separate fight.
- “Just good shootin’ distance.” In the best-known story, Davis and other soldiers watched Germans setting up a machine gun about 1,000 yards away. When the others said the enemy was out of range, Davis supposedly said, “Why, that’s just good shootin’ distance,” and shot five of them. The encyclopedia says he “reportedly” said it.
- The total. An Arkansas State Archives exhibit says he was credited with killing 24 German soldiers.
The nomination says Davis himself told two of these stories. Arkansas Road Stories argues that many of the details only came out after his death, when there was nobody left to contradict them. None of them are in his citation. The Molleville Farm machine gun is documented. The dugout, the 1,000-yard shots and the totals are stories handed down, and the numbers don’t agree.
His medals
The plaque on his monument, transcribed in the National Register nomination, lists four decorations:
- U.S. Distinguished Service Cross, for October 10, 1918. Congress authorized it by an act of July 9, 1918, and it ranks just below the Medal of Honor as the Army’s second-highest award for extraordinary heroism.
- French Croix de Guerre with Palm, dated April 19, 1919. On the Croix de Guerre, a bronze palm meant the soldier was cited at the army level.
- Gilt Star for the Croix de Guerre, dated April 23, 1919. A gilt star meant a citation at the corps level.
- French Médaille Militaire, dated May 10, 1919. It was given mainly to enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, and to a few top generals.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the Arkansas State Archives and the 29th Infantry Division all list the same four. He was honorably discharged on May 29, 1919.
Pershing’s list and the “fourth greatest hero”
Almost every write-up about Davis says General John J. Pershing ranked him fourth among the 100 greatest American heroes of the war. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the National Register nomination and a marker at the Old State House in Little Rock all put him fourth. The 29th Infantry Division calls it “Pershing’s 100, a list of one hundred individual acts of extraordinary heroism.”
Here’s what can actually be confirmed. In April 1919, newspapers ran a feature saying it was hard to pick out of thousands of brave acts “a few that stood out above all others,” and that “General Pershing’s staff undertook the task.” Davis was one of the Distinguished Service Cross stories printed. In one surviving copy, in the Altus Weekly News of Oklahoma, he isn’t fourth; he’s one of 13 stories on the page.
A researcher who later got a copy of the list from the National Archives reported (on Arkansas Road Stories) that it was titled something like “100 outstanding stories of heroism in the Great War,” that it didn’t seem to be ranked, and that the first sixty or so names were alphabetical. If that’s right, “fourth on the list” is true, but “fourth greatest hero” probably reads more into it than Pershing meant. Arkansas State Parks words it more carefully: Davis “was on General John J. Pershing’s list of WWI’s 100 great heroic stories.” The original list wasn’t available to check, so the “fourth greatest” ranking is best treated as an Arkansas tradition, not a settled fact.
The medals in the tackle box
Back home, Davis went to work at the Big Lake Hunting Club and went right back to hunting and fishing. By every account he didn’t talk about the war. The nomination says his neighbors knew nothing of his medals until the Pershing list came out. When friends asked to see them, he took them out of his old fishing tackle box, “where they rested amid his fishing lures.”
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the nomination and the Arkansas State Archives all tell it, but all were written long after the fact, so treat it as a well-loved local tradition, not a firsthand record. The nomination adds that he wore the medals in public only once, at Christmas, because his mother asked him to. His American Legion friends in the Dud Cason Post in Blytheville liked to show him off, but he hated it. After one time on a stage, “his friends never again subjected him to such an unpleasant experience.”
Gas, tuberculosis and a quiet death
As a scout who went out ahead of his company, the encyclopedia says, Davis ran into poison gas many times. The encyclopedia, the National Register nomination and the Arkansas State Archives all say that exposure led to his tuberculosis. That was the belief at the time, and it can’t really be proven now. One account says the Army had no record of him being gassed, which kept him from getting compensation.
By the fall of 1922 he had advanced pulmonary tuberculosis and couldn’t work. The nomination says he was admitted to U.S. Hospital No. 88, the veterans’ hospital in Memphis, on December 9, 1922, and members of the Blytheville Legion post helped get him there. He died there on January 5, 1923, during an operation, two days after his 35th birthday.
He was buried on January 8 in a small church cemetery in Manila. In August 1923 the Osceola Times ran the headline “Arkansas’ Greatest Hero Lies in Unmarked Grave” and reported that he “now is buried in an unmarked grave near that town.” The nomination says the grave was marked only by a small wooden cross and a pair of “faded, torn American flags.”
The recognition came mostly after he was gone. Sen. T. H. Caraway complained on the U.S. Senate floor that Davis had never gotten any compensation from the government and had been turned down for a caretaker job at the Big Lake refuge because he couldn’t meet Civil Service requirements. The Arkansas legislature passed a resolution, dated January 23, 1923 on the Little Rock marker, naming him “Arkansas’s most distinguished son in action in World War I.”
The pennies and the 1925 monument
In 1923 the American Legion post in Marianna started the Herman Davis Memorial Association. The state Legion, other posts, and the Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis and Elks clubs joined in. Pershing wrote them a letter of support, and Gov. Thomas McRae declared a “Herman Davis Week” in September 1923.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says a “pennies drive” by Arkansas schoolchildren helped pay for the monument. The National Register nomination gives a more mixed picture. A May 1925 Legion newspaper admitted that “the statewide campaign has largely been a failure, except in this [Mississippi] county, where the bulk of the money was raised.” Plans for a university scholarship and a second memorial in Little Rock were dropped. So the kids’ pennies were real help, but most of the money seems to have come from home.
The city of Manila gave land at Baltimore Street and Highway 18. The 25-foot granite shaft came from the Milne, Gray & Varnum quarries in Rutland, Vermont, and was put up by contractor John C. McHaney Jr. A marble statue was ordered from carvers in Carrara, Italy, and ran so late that the nomination says it’s unclear whether it was in place for the dedication. The monument was dedicated on Memorial Day 1925, and Davis’s body was moved from the churchyard and reburied at the back of it.
The back of the shaft reads: “Erected by the people of Mississippi County in grateful memory of their hero Herman Davis … He gave his life upon the altar of his country.”
In 1967 vandals destroyed the original statue. The nomination says it was replaced with an exact copy in Barre granite; the obelisk is unchanged.
Herman Davis State Park today
The Arkansas General Assembly made the memorial a state park in 1953. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 7, 1995. The nomination calls it the only surviving historic site tied to Davis.
The National Register describes a park of “less than one acre,” and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls it one acre of land around the monument and gravesite. What’s there is the obelisk and statue, Davis’s grave behind it, two flagpoles flying the U.S. and Arkansas flags, open lawn and a concrete walk. Arkansas State Parks says the site “preserves Davis’ final resting place and does not include park facilities,” and that it’s open all year.
In March 2018, on the 100th anniversary of his induction, soldiers from the Virginia National Guard’s 29th Infantry Division joined American Legion Post 197 and the Manila Depot Museum to plant a willow oak in his memory. In November 2021 he was inducted into the Arkansas Military Veterans’ Hall of Fame. A great-niece accepted the award.
In Little Rock, in 1954 the old iron fountain at the Old State House, once part of Arkansas’s exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, was renamed the Herman Davis Memorial Fountain, and a marker nearby tells his story.
If you want to visit
- Where: Arkansas State Parks gives the location as the corner of Ark. 18B and Baltimore Street, Manila, AR 72442. Older sources say Highway 18. Manila is in western Mississippi County, east of Jonesboro.
- When: Open all year. The state says the site has no park facilities, so plan on no restrooms.
- What to expect: A monument, a grave and a lawn. Read the plaque on the front and the inscription on the back, and remember it’s a grave.
- Nearby: Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge, the water Herman hunted, is about 2 miles east of town. It covers 11,038 acres, and waterfowl peak in January and February. Check the refuge’s hunting dates and rules before you go.
- Questions: The state parks page lists hermandavis@arkansas.com as the contact.
Manila is in the Delta, not the Ozarks, but Herman’s story belongs with the rest of Arkansas’s back-country history. For more like it, see Arkansas and Ozarks History Worth Knowing, Ozark Saltpeter Caves and Ozark Springhouses.
Related on djgaston.com
- Arkansas and Ozarks History Worth Knowing
- Ozark Saltpeter Caves: How Cave Dirt Became Civil War Gunpowder (and the Story of Bean Cave)
- Ozark Springhouses: How Families Kept Food Cold Before Refrigerators
- How to Start (and Put Out) a Campfire Safely
- Venomous Snakes of Arkansas and the Ozarks
Sources
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Herman Davis (1888–1923),” by Donna Brewer Jackson: encyclopediaofarkansas.net
- National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, “Herman Davis Memorial,” Manila, Mississippi County (Mark Christ, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, 1995): arkansasheritage.com
- Arkansas State Parks, “Herman Davis State Park”: arkansasstateparks.com
- Hall of Valor (Military Times), Herman Davis, Distinguished Service Cross citation, War Department General Orders No. 46 (1919): valor.militarytimes.com
- John A. Cutchins and George Scott Stewart Jr., History of the Twenty-ninth Division, “Blue and Gray,” 1917–1919 (Philadelphia, 1921): archive.org
- American Battle Monuments Commission, American Armies and Battlefields in Europe, Meuse-Argonne chapter: abmc.gov
- Jimmy Price, “From Molleville Farm to Memorial Day,” Over There: Blogging the AEF & WWI (2015): overthere1.blogspot.com
- The Altus Weekly News (Altus, Okla.), April 10, 1919, p. 3, via The Gateway to Oklahoma History: gateway.okhistory.org
- Arkansas Road Stories, “Arkies at War: Herman Davis of Manila” (with reader correspondence on the Pershing list): arkansasroadstories.com
- Arkansas State Archives, “Arkansas in the Great War Part III: In the Trenches,” Google Arts & Culture: artsandculture.google.com
- Virginia National Guard, “29th Soldiers participate in ceremony honoring WWI veteran” (2018): va.ng.mil
- Northeast Arkansas Town Courier, “Manila WWI hero inducted in the Arkansas Veterans Hall of Fame” (2021): neatowncourier.com
- Historical Marker Database, “In Memory of Herman Davis” (Old State House, Little Rock): hmdb.org
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Big Lake Wars”: encyclopediaofarkansas.net
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge” and “State Parks Division”: Big Lake NWR; State Parks Division
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge” and “Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918”: fws.gov/refuge/big-lake; fws.gov/law
- Audubon, “The History and Evolution of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act” (2015): audubon.org
- Ducks Unlimited, “The Birth of Wildlife Conservation”: ducks.org
- Wikipedia, “Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge” (distance from Manila): wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, “Croix de guerre 1914–1918 (France),” “Médaille militaire” and “Distinguished Service Cross (United States)” (award background only): Croix de guerre; Médaille militaire; DSC
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