Georgia Louise Davis was the first black woman ever to attend prep school in Maine, winning a scholarship to Fryeburg Academy in 1947. “I was just 15,” she says. “I wanted to be a dancer, a pediatrician, all sorts of things. I could also play the piano,” she slides in. “Back then, everybody wanted to play Rachmaninov’s second and third concertos, I remember working on an elementary version of Chopin’s Warsaw Concerto,” but it was hard to conceal her love for “Fats Waller, Billy Erskin – remember ‘Tipping In’? I grew up with classical music in my house, but my mother also loved jazz.”

The fall of 1947 began like any other. Summer people from Lovell and the surrounding lakes and mountains had already headed home. Farmers raced the frost to harvest their crops before the 97th Fryeburg Fair. At Fryeburg Academy, faculty and students began the school’s 155th year of serving as both the local high school and a boarding school for young people from all over the world.

Into this rarefied atmosphere entered five-foot-four Louise Davis, the eldest daughter of two faculty members from the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia.

The young Miss Davis had caught the attention of Hilda Fife, a University of Maine professor who taught summer school in the Davises’ hometown.

Fearing that the their daughter might never get an equal education in the separate, all-black schools, Davis’s parents quickly consented to the adventure a Yankee education offered to their daughter.