Gideon Ousley Davis (18 July 1868–22 April 1947), president of Virginia Christian College (later the University of Lynchburg), was born in Patrick County and was the son of Charles E. Davis, a farmer, and Elizabeth B. North Davis, a schoolteacher. By the time he was two years old, the family had moved to Garrard County, Kentucky. After his father died in 1877, the family relocated once again, to Bourbon County, Kansas. Orphaned by his mother's death in 1883, Davis eventually returned to Virginia and attended a business school in Lynchburg, where by 1894 he was teaching classes. He matriculated at Milligan College, just east of Johnson City, Tennessee. There on 19 May 1898 he married the school's music teacher, Sallie Wade. They had no children.
Davis taught in Milligan's commercial school from 1896 until 1903, during which time he graduated with a B.A. in 1901. He undertook graduate studies in English literature at the University of Virginia before receiving an M.A. in 1904 from Virginia Christian College, a small, coeducational liberal arts institution in Lynchburg affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. Davis then returned to Milligan College, where he served as vice president and taught history and English literature during the 1904–1905 academic year.
In 1905 he joined the faculty of Virginia Christian College, which had been founded by his mentor and former president of Milligan College, Josephus Hopwood. Davis served as vice president and financial secretary while also teaching in the departments of history and English literature. Three years later he took on an additional position as secretary and treasurer of the school's board of trustees. His fund-raising was arduous and entailed traveling extensively, managing promotional campaigns, negotiating with local lending agencies, and initiating a bond drive. While he sought to liquidate debts, the college was expanding and needed new facilities. Davis helped secure a $20,000 contribution from Andrew Carnegie for a men's dormitory and also raised funds for an academic building. The college, however, remained heavily in debt.
In June 1909 Davis resigned as vice president and financial agent and from that year until 1911 pursued graduate study in philosophy at Harvard University, which awarded him an A.M. in 1916. He returned to Virginia Christian College in 1911 as professor of history and philosophy. On 29 October 1912 Davis was appointed acting president of VCC and chair of the board of trustees' executive committee. Reelected acting president the following June, he continued to be preoccupied with managing the college's financial problems, which were exacerbated by declining enrollments. A successful fund-raising campaign and Davis's ability to run the school without adding to its debts allowed VCC to avert disaster. He resigned as acting president in September 1913, but the board of trustees persuaded him to remain. The following January the trustees appointed him the third president of the college, but poor health forced him to resign five months later on 9 June 1914.
Davis pursued graduate study at the University of Colorado during the 1914–1915 academic term and then returned to Milligan College as a faculty member the following year. In 1917 he once again became the school's financial secretary before serving in the army for fourteen months during World War I as an educational secretary in New York. Davis moved to Auburn, in Barrow County, Georgia, in 1919 to teach at Southeastern Christian College, but ill health forced him to give up teaching. In 1920 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he was ordained a Disciples of Christ minister. Davis worked as an assistant pastor and as an education director in Los Angeles until 1923, when he was hired as pastor of the Disciples church in Santa Paula. Declining health and the need to care for his ill wife ended his ministerial career in 1927. Because of their health concerns and financial difficulties, Davis intermittently received stipends from the Disciples of Christ ministerial pension fund beginning in November 1931. His wife died in January 1933. He was judged incompetent to manage his financial affairs in 1945, and his assets were placed under guardianship. Gideon Ousley Davis died in a Los Angeles sanitarium of pneumonia and heart disease on 22 April 1947 and was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery, in Inglewood, California.
Sources Consulted:
Biographical information, including self-reported birth and marriage dates, in Disciples of Christ Pension Fund Minister's Application, Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, Tennessee; middle name in Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1930 (1930), 1916; variant middle name of Ousel in University of Colorado Bulletin 15 (Mar. 1915): 274; Milligan College registers and catalogs, P. H. Welshimer Memorial Library, Milligan College, Tennessee; Virginia Christian College materials including Argonaut 2 (1908): 4–5, 10 (portrait), board of trustees and faculty minutes, business and financial records, and catalogs, all Knight-Capron Library, University of Lynchburg; Lynchburg News, 16 Sept. 1914; Orville Wentworth Wake, "A History of Lynchburg College, 1903–1953" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1957), esp. 172–174; Michael Wayne Santos, A Beacon through the Years: A History of Lynchburg College, 1903–2003 (2005), 98–101 (portrait on 99), 112–115; Death Certificate, State of California, Department of Public Health, Los Angeles Co. (with variant birthplace of Charlotte Co.).
Image courtesy of University of Lynchburg Archives.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Deborah Beckel.
How to cite this page:
Deborah Beckel,"Gideon Ousley Davis (1868–1947)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2018 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davis_Gideon_Ousley, accessed [today's date]).
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