Virginia Davis was born in Cushing, Maine, in 1834. She attended school in Maine, and later in Boston, and traveled to Europe briefly in 1857. On May 28, 1858, she married Oliver Crosby Gray (1832-1905), from nearby Lincoln County, who had studied Colby College. They had three children, including Carl Raymond Gray (1867-1939), president of Union Pacific Railroad from 1920 to 1937. The family moved to Monticello, Minnesota, and briefly lived in Mississippi before moving to Princeton, Dallas County, Arkansas, in 1860. There, they taught at Princeton Female Academy. Oliver joined the Confederate States of America cavalry from 1861 until 1864, when he resigned and briefly joined the Confederate Navy. He was imprisoned by the Union Army in late 1864 and released in March 1865.

In 1867 the family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas,where Oliver taught at St. Johns’ College, a Masonic institution. From 1871 to 1874 he served as its president. During the "Brooks-Baxter War" in 1874, he supported Elisha Baxter, arming his students to support the governor-elect. Following this, Oliver was appointed chair of the Mathematics and Civil Engineering Department at the new Arkansas Industrial University (now University of Arkansas), in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Virginia was appointed chair of the art department the same year. She retained that position for six years, 1874-1881. Virginia died in 1886.

Oliver continued his prestigious career by serving both as mayor of Fayetteville and superintendent of the newly-formed Fayetteville Public Schools in 1886. As a member of the first school board, Oliver had been a founder of the first public school in Fayetteville. In 1889, he married Mary Melbourne Borland Beattie (1850-1938), a widow with thre children, and the daughter of former U.S. Senator Solon Borland of Little Rock. Oliver moved back to Little Rock in 1895 to serve as superintendent of the Arkansas School for the Blind. He held that position until 1899, when he accepted a commission at the Speers-Langford Military Institute in Searcy, White County, Arkansas. In 1901, he returned to Little Rock and regained the superintendent position at the School for the Blind, which he served as until his death in 1905.

Virginia Davis Gray’s civil war diary was published in 1983. See Carl H. Moneyhon, editor, “Life in Confederate Arkansas: The Diary of Virginia Davis Gray, 1863-1865, Part I. Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol.42 (Spring 1983), pp. 47-85; Ibid., Part II, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 42 (Summer 1983), pp. 134-169.