Mother of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Early Female Legislator 

"Ann was not very active in the initial stages of making her national park idea a reality, nor in politics in general. Indeed it was a shock to W.P. Davis, according to a later account by their daughter Barbara Davis Kesterson, when Mrs. Davis ran for an open seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1925. 'Dad almost fainted when she decided to run,' recalled Kesterson, as quoted later in a Knoxville newspaper. 

But run she did, and win she did. Remarkably, the soft-spoken Knoxville matron, who had just become a grandmother, was only the third woman to ever be elected to the Tennessee Legislature and the first female Republican ever to do so. Her election victory came only four years after the enactment of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that had made refusal of voting privileges based on gender illegal. Many have said she pursued the office for the sole purpose of furthering the state’s efforts to establish a national park, but she suggested otherwise in at least one newspaper report.

'I have never been interested in politics just for the sake of playing the political game but I have always been interested in women and their advancement along all lines,' she was quoted in a 1925 Knoxville newspaper. '… I saw in this a way to make an opening for the women of my section of Tennessee in state politics' and called for more women to be elected to the state legislature. Ann went on to state that she was 'very much interested in getting the National park for this section and am for the University of Tennessee appropriation.'

Whether it was one issue or many that enticed Ann to run for office, she certainly was instrumental in introducing a bill early in the 1925 session that would authorize the state of Tennessee’s purchase of the first parcel of land for the park—a 76,507-acre tract held by Little River Lumber Co. near the Little River Gorge. The U.S. government had by then made it clear that if a national park was to be established it would cover ground in both Tennessee and North Carolina and that both states would need to secure deeds for 150,000 contiguous acres. This first bill aimed at beginning to meet that requirement encountered stiff opposition in the Legislature. It passed in the Senate but failed in the House. Gov. Peay, as determined as Mr. and Mrs. Davis to make the park happen, reintroduced the bill the very next day with the stipulation that Knoxville pay one-third the cost of the land purchase. The governor signed it into law on April 10, 1925, using a quill pen he then presented to Rep. Ann Davis."

                                                                                                                         - T. Wayne Waters, "The First Family of the

                                                                                                                            Great Smoky Mountains National Park," in

                                                                                                                            Smoky Mountain Living Magazine (2011)