Rebecca Stirman Davidson (1843-1912) was a lifetime resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas. She, along with her brothers, William and Erasmus (Ras), were orphaned at an early age and raised by their aunt, Mary Stirman Pollard. Rebecca attended Sophia Sawyer's school in the decade preceding the Civil War, while her older brother Ras attended Arkansas College and clerked in a dry goods store. In 1861, Ras enlisted as a private in the Pike Guards, a local militia unit, and marched north with other southern troops to engage in the Wilson's Creek campaign of southwest Missouri. Rebecca remained at Fayetteville for most of the war years, leaving once in early 1862 after the town was burned by Confederate forces, and finally banished by the Union occupation forces in 1864 for aiding the enemy. Ras stayed with the army until 1865, eventually becoming captain of Company E, First Battalion of Arkansas Cavalry, and colonel of his own regiment of sharpshooters. Following the war, Rebecca and Ras returned to Fayetteville. Rebecca married James E. Trott, a local merchant, and the couple had one daughter, Roberta, before Trott's death sometime around 1870. Rebecca subsequently married Benjamin R. Davidson, a prominent local attorney. Ras became an attorney himself, was elected mayor of Fayetteville in 1868, and married Mirium Gist of New Castle, Kentucky, in 1870. In 1879 the couple moved to Denver, Colorado, where Ras died in 1914.

Rebecca Stirman Davidson's daughter, Roberta Trott, was courted in the early 1890s by John Turner Stinson (1865-1958), a horticulturist for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station at Fayetteville.

Stinson was from Iowa and had received a degree from the Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa, in 1890. He founded the horticulture department at the University of Arkansas when he became a professor in 1895. John and Roberta married in 1894 and eventually had four children, Rebecca, Benjamin, Ruth, and John Jr. The Stinsons left Arkansas in 1900 when he accepted a position at the Missouri State Fruit Experiment Station at Mountain Grove, Missouri. He finished his career as the Director of Agricultural Development for the Missouri Pacific Rail Road and became an outspoken advocate of soil conservation.