Charles E. Davis, an expert watchmaker and jeweler, arrived in Great Falls with his wife, Grace, in 1900. With Charles’ two brothers, they opened a store on Central Avenue that sold jewelry, watches, cut glass, gifts, and eyeglasses, and their son William later continued the family business, which remained a Central Avenue institution until 1983. In 1902, the Davises built a two-story residence whose architecture bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, combining fish-scale shingles in the gable end that evoke the Queen Anne style with cleaner Colonial Revival lines that grew more popular after the turn of the century. Charles and Grace raised four children there, and three of them continued living in the home into adulthood. In 1930, the residence was valued at $10,000 and housed Charles and Grace, two grown sons, a teenage daughter, and a live-in servant. When Charles died at seventy-seven in 1948, he was thought to be Central Avenue’s oldest active businessman, and Grace remained in the family home until 1958.