Hazel Inez (Lee) Davies, graduate nurse and statistician-economist with the U.S. Coal Commission of the Bureau of Mines, was born March 5, 1890 at Ogdensburg, Wisconsin. Her parents, William John Lee and Myrtle Evelyn Carter, operated the Ogdensburg House until 1894 when they separated. Hazel Lee graduated from Jennings Seminary, an Aurora, Illinois, boarding school, in 1906. The next year she entered nurses training at Palmyra Springs Sanitarium in Palmyra, Wisconsin. Dissatisfied with the training she was receiving she transferred in 1908 to St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing in Racine, from which she graduated on December 24, 1909. (There were no state board examinations then, so she could not use the title, RN.) She left St. Luke's a few months after graduation for private duty nursing. About 1913 she initiated a St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing Alumni group, which in time became a formal alumni association whose scholarship fund has since been named for her. On October 18, 1912 Miss Lee married George Gibson Davies (1879-1963) of Racine. This marriage was to last nearly 51 years until his death on October 13, 1963.
After her husband began work with the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., in 1918, Hazel Davies also took a position with the government, first as an office worker and, subsequently, associated with each successive agency dealing with the coal industry. She retired in 1947 as statistician-economist with the Bureau of Mines. In 1952-1953 she spent about six months as a real estate agent in the Washington, D.C., area but found this not worth the effort expended. The couple moved to Winter Haven, Florida, in 1954, and after 1947 retained summer homes in the Oneida-Vilas counties area of Wisconsin, one at Lake Tomahawk and from 1956 one on Lake Shishebogama near Minocqua. For three summers Hazel Davies worked as a tour guide for naturalist-anthropologist author Alonzo Pond in his Wisconsin Gardens. The Gardens adjoined the Birchwood-Pines Community of which Davies'cabin had originally been a part. Her leisure was absorbed in fishing, photography, social evenings of cards and conversation or at the “movies,” and women's clubs offices and activities. At the age of 65, Hazel Davies took up painting. She attended classes, entered her paintings in art and craft shows, and received commissions for her work. Several photographs of her paintings have been transferred to the Visual Materials Archives of the Historical Society along with her photo albums and other photographs.
The Davies had no children. After George Davies's death in 1963, shortly after their return from their summer home in Wisconsin, Hazel Davies continued to spend her winters in Florida (now in Clearwater), and until 1978 her summers in Minocqua. She died April 5, 1980 in Florida.
