“Aunt” Hannah Davis, an Inventor, Entrepreneur and Maker of Beautiful Boxes

Hannah Davis

HANNAH DAVIS (1784-1863) ~ “Aunt Hannah” Davis manufactured and sold the country's first wooden bandboxes, covered in colorful papers and used for jewelry, hats, and suitcases. Left alone with her widowed mother as a young woman, she became an entrepreneur, an inventor, and a manufacturer of “warranted nailed wooden bandboxes.” The bodies or "scabboards" of the boxes were made of shaved veneers from selected old growth spruce, then common in local forests. She chose the trees to be logged, bartered to get each tree, then hired them cut and hauled to her door where they were cut to appropriate lengths.

Davis invented a foot-powered machine which would slice thin sections. The first slices were narrow and served for cover bands, or small boxes. In the center, they reached a width to make boxes equal to large suitcases of today. The sides were bent to an oval shape and firmly nailed while green. The bottoms and tops were made from old pine boards. They were covered with wallpaper of gay and varied designs, and lined inside with newspapers.

"Aunt Hannah" drove her covered wagon to nearby mill towns to sell the boxes—featured in Godey's Ladies Book—to the women workers. Mary Fox of Jaffrey Center recalled Aunt Hannah in 1920: “She was an old woman, large and strong looking, walking with a limp and wearing a shoe with a very thick sole on one foot. This was on account of her having had a broken hip.” She retired to a small white house that still stands on Main Street across from Highland Ave.

Hannah Davis sign from the Melville Academy Museum exhibit.