For more than a decade, from 2010 until 2023, Rebekah Davis proudly served as the Limestone County Archivist — quietly overseeing and keeping straight decades of the region’s rich history.

“I didn’t have a formal education in archival training when I first got the job, but I learned from reaching out to my colleagues from around the state,” Davis told The News Courier. “I tried to learn as much as I could from them, that’s how I got my archival education. I was then able to implement all of those things I learned to the Limestone County Archives. So, we could preserve the historic records while also making them accessible to the public.”

On Friday, Oct. 18, Davis and her work with the Limestone County Archives made a bit of local history herself — as she was honored with the 2024 Marvin Yeomans Whiting Award at the Society of Alabama Archivists’ annual meeting in Opelika.

“Now that I’ve moved on to a different field, to have those same colleagues come back and acknowledge all of the efforts we put in really means more to me than I can even express,” Davis said. “It was very humbling and I am very, very grateful that they thought so highly of the job we did in Limestone County.”

Named after a Birmingham Public Library archivist who helped pioneer the profession in Alabama, the Marvin Yeomans Whiting Award annually recognizes the significant contributions made to the preservation and dissemination of local Alabama history.

During Davis’ 13-year tenure as the county’s archivist, she was able to obtain a sizeable grant which helped fund the renovation of the archival building located at 102 W. Washington St.

“Probably the biggest project we undertook while I was there was the renovation of the 1905 train depot,” Davis said. “At the time it was just an old wooden building filled with important pieces of paper that had no fire protection in it at all. So, to have been able to get that building up to speed while also preserving the beauty and history of the building was amazing, but I could not have done it alone.”

While with the Limestone County Archives Davis also began the Homegrown History Podcast, traveled Alabama as a road scholar for the Alabama Humanities Foundation, contributed to numerous scholarly articles and served as president of the National Association of Government Archives and Records Managers and the Society of Alabama Archivists.

For each of these projects, Davis also credited the work of her longtime assistant archivist April Davis — who still works at the Limestone County Archives to this day.

“I hired her about four months after I got hired, so we were together for pretty much the whole time,” Rebekah Davis said. “We learned together, worked together, moved books together, so I am just really grateful to her. She has put in a lot of work interacting with some of our regulars and also greeting people who traveled from other states and countries as well.”

Davis’ long-list of accomplishments with the archives also included her partnership with the Smithsonian Institution to create a special exhibit called “The Way Athens Works.” She has also been honored with four separate awards by Main Street Alabama and two other awards from the Alabama Bicentennial Commission.

Despite those awards, Davis emphasized that the most fulfilling part of her career was seeing members of the youth embrace history — as she spent innumerable hours with school children encouraging them to connect with their local history.

“Once people started really digging, they just got hooked,” Davis said. “You are never going to find the end of a story with history, you are always learning something. I would encourage anyone who has questions to just give the local archives a try, now sometimes it takes some digging, but you just need to know where to look. To me, that’s what archives and records programs are all about.”