In the summer of 1936, the Rev. John Davies and his pregnant wife, Hermina, camped for two weeks in an umbrella tent on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. The couple had previously ministered to the Chippewa for two years and were exploring the opportunities to serve both the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Native Americans. They ended up staying and serving as missionaries there for eighteen years. Hermina raised John, Janice, Beth, Helen, David, Rachel, and Rebecca while serving these congregations, receiving her heavenly rest on this date in 1995. John and Hermina over the years had many adventures while serving the Lord. The Davies used this same tent, pitched next to a public school, to hold vacation Bible school. Once fierce winds bent some of the tent poles, but God kept them safe in the tent and not a tent peg came loose. Yet the tornado had blown out a school window and knocked down a nearby barn. Less dangerous, every Halloween children on the reservation tipped over the Davies’ outhouse (they never had indoor plumbing).
John and Hermina ministered to the Menominee as well as the Stockbridge-Munsee Native Americans on the adjoining reservation. They held “Sunday” school in the woods or at the Roundhouse, the Indian dance hall, on Saturdays on the Menominee reservation. It took John two trips to pick up twenty-five children in his Model A Ford, with kids standing on the running boards, hanging onto the hood. Hermina played hide and seek with the first group while John picked up the second group. During Sunday school Hermina pumped and played their portable folding organ and also directed the senior choir. She also often visited homes on the reservation with John as a man couldn’t properly visit a woman on his own.
Although John accepted a call to Wildwood, New Jersey in 1954, and later served in Glenwood, Washington, their hearts were united to their Native Americans brothers and sisters. As a legally blind widow in 1994, Hermima returned to speak at a mother-daughter dinner for both congregations, one year before her final Home Going in 1995.