Davis Andrew McFarland

Davis Andrew McFarland pursued American history through legal training, financial experience, and family connections that informed a varied body of writing. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1833, he studied at Harvard and later became active in banking and learned societies. His mother, Eliza Bancroft Davis, was a sister of the historian and statesman George Bancroft. That relationship gave his short study George Bancroft an unusually close personal foundation. Issued around 1891, the work considers a nationally prominent historian through the perspective of a younger relative who also understood archival and institutional history. Davis wrote on colonial currency, Massachusetts finance, and the origins of important American institutions, while collecting papers and research materials that later became valuable to libraries. George Bancroft therefore fits both sides of his historical practice: careful attention to public achievement and familiarity with the private networks surrounding it. His prose and collecting helped preserve evidence about New England scholarship, finance, and civic life across the nineteenth century.