Kenneth Anderson Davidson M.D.

In 1835 he studied medicine in Ann Arbor Michigan. His first wife died in childbirth and he divorced his second wife fathering eleven children (five of them died in infancy).

Joining a wagon train bound for Los Angeles in 1852 he came West with his daughter Mettie. He was the wagon train doctor and when a cholera epidemic broke out he did not lose a single patient.

He came to Michigan Bar in California where he was doctor for the local miners and was so busy patching up from stabbings and bullet wounds that he had to hide in the brush to get some sleep.

In 1871 he moved to Janesville/Gas Point community in Shasta County. There he bought land and a store and had a nine room two story house painted white. He was lonesome and persuaded his daughter Sarah and her husband John Shepard Williams to come live with him. They came from Michigan with their five children.

Due to malaria outbreaks in 1881 the family moved to higher ground a few miles away and established the town of Pinckney. There they built a new house, store and cracker bakery adjoining the store. The crackers were round and oval shaped with figurines stamped on them and sold in a cracker barrel in the store. Joaquin Miller known as the Poet of the Sierra stayed overnight with them.

A cancer had grown on his chest where in earlier days he had been severely hit with a pick handle. In the spring of 1884 he performed surgery on himself with his heart beating just a few membranes deeper. An Indian boy helped by holding a mirror as he didn’t want his family to watch. He kept the area very clean changing the dressing himself daily. But he had put off the surgery and it was too late. He deeded a acre of his land in Pinckney for a community cemetery. He died in 1884 four days after his 83rd birthday.