James A. Davidson (November 23, 1891-March 24, 1987) was a native of Banff, Scotland who emigrated to the US in 1910. He founded his construction company in Raleigh in 1918 and advanced to become one of the city’s major residential, church and commercial builders during much of the 20th century. Davidson worked with Raleigh’s leading architects such as Thomas W. Cooper, William Henley Deitrick, and James A. Salter. Along with a small number of other respected local builders such as John N. Coffey of the Coffey Family, Davidson’s high construction standards complemented the architects’ design skills to define much of Raleigh’s notable architectural character of the early to mid-20th century. After World War II, the company he founded would become known as Davidson and Jones; it continues to bear his name into the 21st century as a major building and construction services firm. This entry and building list focuses on the period when James A. Davidson was actively involved in the firm.

Davidson had learned the house-building trade from his father, a master builder who had been brought up in the shipbuilding industry with keen precision and finely-honed skills. His father apprenticed several young men in the house-building trade and from that experience his son became knowledgeable and eager to pursue his own career. When James Davidson arrived in the US he worked for two years with his uncle building houses in Washington, D. C. He later got a job in New York City, first with the Cudahy Packing Company and then the Morris Meat Packing Company as their construction supervisor. Near the end of World War I, the Morris Company began retooling for peacetime service, allowing Davidson to take a vacation in Raleigh with his wife to visit her relatives.

Davidson was acquainted with the area because in 1914 he had married a fellow Scottish immigrant, Christina Gibson Russell, who had settled with her family in the Raleigh area a year before Davidson arrived in this country; they apparently met while she was visiting relatives in the Washington, D. C. area when he worked there. The extended Russell family had come to Raleigh because Christina’s brother, Alexander, sponsored them while working as the superintendent for the Experiment Farm at the NC College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (later NC State University) as part of the Agricultural Land Grant from the federal government.

The combination of the Spanish Flu and World War I had diminished the number of knowledgeable builders in the Raleigh area, particularly those who focused on the higher end of the trade, and local businessmen had confidence that, with the end of the war, a pent up demand for housing would ensue. Davidson was persuaded to stay and set up business as an independent contractor and, with backing and support from a few area leaders, he started his fledgling business. It was a time in which large, impressive homes were built and businesses were started, and by the middle 1920s Davidson’s firm was prospering. In 1928, Davidson became a United States citizen and soon after, a leading member of the Civitan club, a service organization that promoted good citizenship, especially among students.

Davidson’s first job was building two small wooden warehouses for the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company near downtown. An important early connection came in 1921 when he did some carpentry work for Peace College, a Presbyterian school for women. This inaugurated a professional relationship in which he built a number of classrooms and administrative buildings and an association that would last his whole career, culminating in the naming of a campus building for him in 1986.

His first notable residential opportunity came from a wealthy widow, Kitty Holt Drewry, for whom he built a garage-apartment in the new and exclusive suburb of Hayes Barton north of downtown. The Raleigh city directory of 1922 listed “Holt Drewry,” the widow of John C. Drewry, residing on Cowper Drive near Glenwood Avenue in Hayes Barton. She was a daughter of Alamance County industrialist Lynn Banks Holt; it was common practice for a widow to use her maiden name as a first name in publications.

The Drewry commission with some other small projects helped Davidson build a reputation until he caught the tide of a housing boomlet in the city during the 1920s. The growth and prestige of Hayes Barton, where wealthy clients employed architects to plan fine houses in a spaciously designed setting, were central to Davidson’s growing business and stature in the community. He soon gained renown for his attention to detail, use of quality materials, and good value. From his home on Woodland Avenue he was able to check on his nearby Hayes Barton clients at least twice a day and do the same for clients throughout the city.

Among the Davidson firm’s most impressive residences were those built for Col. Albert L. Cox, a hero of World War I; S. Brown Shepherd, an attorney—both in Hayes Barton—and Clarence Poe, publisher of the influential Progressive Farmer. The house Davidson built for Cox in Hayes Barton was a replica of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, which expressed its owner’s status and captured local attention as a grand mansion; for Davidson, building such a landmark and working with locally noted architect Thomas W. Cooper established him in the public eye as a builder of fine homes.

Davidson continued to do substantial work in and around Hayes Barton. His projects in the suburb included a grand series of houses on Carr Street, such as the Georgian Revival residence for attorney Leon S. Brassfield, a Spanish Colonial Revival house next door for attorney Thomas Ruffin, and a Tudor Revival duplex down the street for George Richardson, investor and entrepreneur. Also on Carr Street, Davidson built a massive Georgian Revival, stone house for Howard White, president of the White Lumber Company, purveyor of lumber throughout the southeast. These signature houses cemented Davidson’s reputation as a premier homebuilder.

Outside of Raleigh, Davidson built for Clarence Poe a large stone residence, a 12-room country estate on Poe’s 800-acre property. The house had 5 bedrooms, 3 ½ baths, a sleeping porch, screened porch, library, living and dining rooms, breakfast or “morning” rooms, a serving pantry and kitchen. Seven of the rooms had fireplaces. Located three miles east of the city, the place later became the centerpiece for a housing development known as Longview Gardens.

Davidson also built apartment houses and a few commercial structures in this period, and he began his long association with building churches. By the end of his career the firm had built more than 140 churches; at the time of Davidson’s death in 1987 these included every Presbyterian church in Raleigh except First Presbyterian Church (1900), which the firm remodeled twice. Davidson’s first church project was the large Romanesque-style Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, built when its congregation moved westward in the 1920s from South Street in central Raleigh to its current location on Hillsborough Street near present North Carolina State University. Summing up recent accomplishments in its 50th anniversary edition of 1925, the Raleigh Times reported that in just a year and a half, Davidson’s company had “done upwards of $350,000 worth of construction in church and residence buildings [the equivalent of more than $5 million in 2020]. This included Pullen Memorial, First Christian and First Vanguard churches and residences for General Albert Cox, Dr. Clarence Poe, and Howard White.”

When the national and local economy took a nose dive with the Crash of 1929, Davidson’s clientele suffered financial losses, and his opportunities for new construction dwindled. Many mortgages were foreclosed, including those for some of Davidson’s most impressive residences, and the properties were repossessed or sold. Davidson barely kept his firm solvent during the Depression by revitalizing repossessed homes for resale by the lenders. According to Davidson, “Before they would resell a home, they always painted it and repaired it. The work kept me going….. At the time, I owed the banks a little more than they owed me. It was a pretty sad time, all those people out of work. I was just one of the fortunate ones. When Raleigh’s economy finally headed up again in 1933 and 1934, it didn’t take Raleigh long to jump out of it.”

Although there were few opportunities for grand residential projects in the 1930s, the firm took on a number of business buildings and other functional structures and made good use of the local newspapers to keep its name in the public eye. Upon completion in 1930 of the Raleigh Firestone Service Station at the corner of Martin and McDowell streets, Davidson joined the other companies involved in it’s constructing by running a congratulatory advertisement. His advertisement pictured the Art Deco facility and stated, “Of Course We Built It and believe it to be one of the finest in North Carolina. When Raleigh People Want a Building Built—Call James A. Davidson, General Contractor” (News and Observer, June 13, 1930). An especially prestigious commission was the construction of the picturesque, stone “House of Memory,” now known as the Confederate Memorial Pavilion at Raleigh’s Oakwood Cemetery; a project encouraged by Mrs. Alfred Williams since the late 1920s, it was designed by architect Thomas Wright Cooper and the cornerstone was finally laid in 1935. Such was Davidson’s reputation that when a realtor advertised for sale a 8-room brick residence at 2129 Country Club Drive, the text stated, “House built by James A. Davidson” (News and Observer, May 1, 1937). Reporting on every sign of economic hope, the News and Observer of April 5, 1938, listed recent building permits for proposed apartment complexes, a grocery store at Five Points (Hayes Barton), and several modest residences such as a $7,000 duplex on Arlington Street, a $4,000 home on Mordecai Drive, and “three homes, each to cost $5100, on West Peace Street,” the lattermost by James A. Davidson.

In 1935, Davidson brought on an inexperienced carpenter’s helper, Seby Jones, who learned the business and rose within the company. Jones later married Davidson’s wife’s niece, thereby cementing the relationship. Throughout the late 1930s, as the general financial situation eased, the firm was active in building larger homes and churches and also became more involved in light commercial construction. By 1945, Jones had proved himself not only in the building business but also as a developer who could envision larger and more profitable jobs that could advance the company to higher levels of accomplishment. Davidson formed a partnership with Jones that became the Davidson and Jones Construction Company.

With the war ended and the economy on the upswing, Davidson and Jones was poised to take advantage of a pent-up demand for building and expansion. An important postwar commission, adjoining the Hayes Barton neighborhood, was one of Davidson’s best known church projects: the Georgian Revival style White Memorial Church, built in 1948-1951 from designs by Richmond, Virginia, architect Courtenay S. Welton.

The 1950s and 1960s saw an unparalleled level of activity for the company which expanded into larger, more complicated, and more profitable business including public complexes and institutional buildings. Seby Jones’s son, Roddy Jones, also joined the firm. The company developed into a major regional business whose profits derived from the investment of capital and expertise into designing, building, and selling shopping centers, hotels, motels, and speculative commercial buildings.

Throughout his career, James A. Davidson always worked with architects and executed projects with Raleigh’s best practitioners. He felt strongly that architects not only provided precise building details and specifications (builders’ plans were a “lazy and cheap substitute for quality”) but also served as a necessary buffer between customers and the builder. Indicative of his relationship with architect William Henley Deitrick, when Dietrick planned his own beautifully detailed Georgian Revival style home (1936) on Glenwood Avenue, he commissioned Davidson to build it.

Davidson was a strong proponent of standards for both architects, with whom he worked closely, and for general contractors with whom he competed. He was among the first to promote greater professionalism among his fellow contractors, both in terms of licensure, higher standards, and professional associations that would promote greater education and discussion of ethical business practices. Before there was state legislation regulating architects and builders, Charlotte V. Brown points out in NC Architects and Builders, that “a contractor qualified for a license by submitting a resume and recommendations from clients and architects. Initially anyone who was qualified for the license was eligible for any job. By 1931, the act was amended to provide a system of classification based on the cost of the job—therefore defining the capacity of firms to provide services and accountability and meet bonding requirements.” She quotes Davidson, who succinctly put it: “‘We had to have the act to keep the jack-legs out. They were a danger to all of us.’ He did not specify if the danger was due to competition or lack of skill.”

James Davidson ceased to work “in the field” in the 1950s. Age, experience and success transformed his role from that of an active general contractor who worked with clients, crews, and architects into that of the head of a company with hundreds of employees including architects and engineers. The addition of the third generation, Seby Jones’s son, Roddy Jones, was instrumental in the expansion of commercial and institutional projects for the Davidson and Jones firm and new approaches to development and construction. With the younger Jones’s leadership, the company continued its rise as one of the largest North Carolina general contractors from the 1960s through the 1990s. The evidence of these years is visible in the Triangle region of North Carolina in such major projects as Crabtree Valley Mall, Sheraton Imperial Hotel, Highwoods Office Park, Cary Town Center, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and Rex Hospital. The Davidson and Jones Company, which continues with the founder’s name, encompasses multiple facets of construction for retail, healthcare, hospitality, office and specialty projects.

As he turned the firm over to Seby Jones, James Davidson remained for several years as a prime company asset—the man whose reputation, institutional knowledge, and relationships of a lifetime had sustained that early investment of a Scottish immigrant with a love of building. His response when questioned about his success: “I am just a plain guy. I’ve always enjoyed the building trade. My father was a builder—it’s all I know.”

Hill’s City Directory (Raleigh), various issues.

News and Observer, July 6, 1925, p. 4; News and Observer, January 1, 1922, p. 12.

Terry A. Henderson, “James A. Davidson, A Biography,” unpublished manuscript, 2019.

Davidson and Jones Archives, private collection, courtesy of Davidson and Jones Company.

James A. Davidson Scrapbook, Charlotte Vestal Brown Papers, Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Catherine W. Bishir, Charlotte V. Brown, Carl R. Lounsbury, and Ernest H. Wood III, Architects and Builders in North Carolina (1990).

Hayes Barton Historic District, National Register of Historic Places nomination (2002).