Julia Davis Park: A Husband's Promise, a City's Heart
Near Boise, Idaho
Julia Davis Park follows the south bank of the Boise River near downtown, and on any warm afternoon it's the center of the city, families, joggers, museum visitors, kids in the rose garden. What it took to create this park is a story worth knowing.
Thomas Jefferson Davis was one of the city's founders. He and his brother Frank had come out from Cincinnati in eighteen sixty-two hoping to catch the Boise Basin gold rush, staked a claim, mined for a year, then gave up on mining and homesteaded a hundred and sixty-three acres of bottomland along the river. They built a cabin. They grew vegetables. In December of eighteen sixty-three, Thomas Davis hosted the meeting where the city of Boise was formally planned.
Years later, he married Julia McCrumb, a woman known for her warmth and her habit of assisting emigrants who stopped their wagons by the river. She welcomed travelers, gave them rest, helped them recover for the journey into Oregon.
When Julia died in nineteen oh seven, Thomas Davis walked to City Hall and offered the city forty acres of riverside land, the land they'd farmed and lived on for decades, on one condition. The city would keep it as a public park. And it would be named for her.
City Council had actually let an earlier offer sit without acting on it. After Julia's death, Tom Davis put it simply: you will take the park, and you will name it after her. They did.
The park opened in nineteen oh seven. It's grown to nearly ninety acres since, and it anchors a chain of riverside parks the city calls the String of Pearls. Tom Davis, who'd come for gold and found something more lasting, is buried nearby.
