![]() ![]() In 1910 Davis and about two dozen other African American businessmen formed a mutual savings and loan association in the Berkley section of Norfolk. For several years during the 1920s he was part-owner and treasurer of the Progressive Drug Company, a drugstore. He also invested in other local businesses. Davis became one of the city's first and perhaps largest-scale African American sheet-metal contractors, installing roofing and interior metal decoration features. His business grew rapidly, and within two years he had hired seven employees. He worked on lawnmowers and woodstoves, among many other items, and fabricated special cones for racing bicycles. In 1911 Davis borrowed $500 and opened a repair shop in Norfolk. Before her death on 17 January 1943, they had one son and one daughter. On 10 April 1905 Davis married the widowed Mattie Martin Page. ![]() He was planning to return to Richmond when he was offered a job in the town of South Norfolk, where for the next nine years he built and repaired machines of various kinds. "Those kind of jobs were difficult for a colored man to secure," Davis later told a journalist, but he was light-skinned enough that he could get hired at places where people did not know him or his family. After leaving school, he worked for about a year in a Petersburg ironworks and in machine shops in Hickory and High Point, North Carolina. ![]() Davis attended the night school of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) for four years and in 1902 received a certificate in machine practice. When very young he was adopted into the family of Robert C. The names of his parents are not known, nor is his original name at birth. Robert Calvin Davis (26 February 1881–), businessman and banker, was born in or near Danville or possibly in Meherrin, in Lunenburg County on the border with Prince Edward County. ![]()
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