DOWAGIAC — It’s not every day that a small-town girl becomes royalty, but it was the case last month for Dowagiac native Natalie Davis, who was crowned Miss Heart of Blossomtime 2019.

“I was honestly in shock,” the 18-year-old said, recalling the moment she was announced to be queen. “I’m really excited. I’ve never really seen myself as the queen type, so getting it was shocking but also amazing, too.”

Davis was crowned Miss Heart of Blossomtime on Nov. 17 at St. Joseph High School. Daughter of Wendy and Jim Davis, Davis is a Dowagiac Union High School graduate and freshman at Southwestern Michigan College. Prior to the Miss Heart of Blossomtime Pageant, she had placed in the top five in past Cass County Fair and Miss Dowagiac pageants.

Now that the shock of her win has worn off, Davis said she is planning to use her crown to represent Dowagiac on the Miss Blossomtime stage and to better serve the community.

“It feels good to be able to represent the community because Miss Dowagiac doesn’t go to Blossomtime,” she said. “It’s just overwhelming, but it feels really good.”

One way she plans to use her win to benefit the community is through nursing. Davis is currently a nursing student at SMC and plans to use the scholarship money from the pageant to eventually transfer to a larger college to become a neonatal nurse.

“In any kind of nursing, you can change someone’s life, but with neonatal specifically, you determine whether or not a baby has the opportunity to live on,” Davis said. “That’s amazing to me.”

Once she completes her nursing degree, Davis said she plans to return to Dowagiac to serve the community with her nursing skills.

“Coming home to help out and build nursing [in the city] would mean a lot to people, I think,” she said.

In the time since her crowning, Davis has been dress shopping, learning about other pageants and meeting other queens in preparation for the Miss Blossomtime contest to take place in March 2019 at Lake Michigan College’s Mendel Center. There, she will compete with fellow queens for $20,000 in scholarships that are awarded each year during the Miss and Mr. Blossomtime pageants.

Though Davis said she would be happy and grateful to become Miss Blossomtime in the spring, even if she doesn’t win, she knows she will appreciate the experience and the opportunity to represent Dowagiac to southwest Michigan.

“A lot of people in Dowagiac don’t know about Blossomtime and a lot of people at Blossomtime don’t know much about Dowagiac, so it will be cool to represent Dowagiac there,” Davis said.