Born Sidney J. Taylor in Missouri, Davis was the granddaughter of Presbyterian minister Titus Basfield, who is buried in Washington, Iowa. Her mother eventually moved to Keokuk where Davis rose to some notoriety being called "one of Keokuk’s most accomplished young artists” in 1894 by the Keokuk Daily Gate City.

Davis spent time in 1897 in Polk County serving as an educator for the Baptist church in the coal mining community of Marquisville, Saylor Township, north of Des Moines. She traveled in the U.S., primarily in southern and western states, working for the Baptist church from about 1905 to 1918. She was profiled with a photograph in the Iowa State Bystander on September 22, 1916. Davis returned to Iowa and Keokuk where she opened a home for young women in 1918 and was named by Gov. William Harding as a delegate to a national conference in Louisville, Kentucky that year.

Davis left for mission work in California by 1923 and then went to New Jersey from 1926 into 1933. By late 1935 her career took her to Washington, D.C. where she opened the Children’s Mission and Bible Handicraft School and continued there into the mid-1940s. Davis’ last known efforts were in Pennsylvania, including Lancaster where she opened a weekday Bible school for children ages four to thirteen in 1945. She later opened a school in Chester in 1949. The final work of her career and date of death are not known.