Virgil Talmadge McCroskey was born in Tennessee on 5 October 1876. The McCroskey family moved to a homestead near the base of Steptoe Butte in 1879. In 1898, McCroskey graduated from the Washington Agricultural College (State College of Washington) with a degree in pharmacy. After working as a pharmacist in several locations in the Pacific Northwest, he purchased the Elk Drug Store in Colfax in 1903. He worked there until 1920, when he retired at the age of forty-four. For the next several years McCroskey traveled around America and the world. In the 1930s, he began purchasing large acreages on and around Steptoe Butte in eastern Washington, and on Skyline Drive in Latah and Benewah counties, Idaho. In 1946, he donated his Steptoe Butte property to become Washington's seventy-second state park. In 1955, McCroskey donated over 4,000 acres along Skyline Drive to become Idaho's third state park. It was named in honor of his mother, Mary Minerva McCroskey. Virgil T. McCroskey died in 1970.

In 1983, the Washington State University History Department received a grant from the Washington Commission for the Humanities, and a financial donation from Lee and Jody McCroskey Sahlin of Spokane, to undertake a project concerning McCroskey and his park donations. Keith Petersen and Mary Reed served as project historians, exhibit designers, and coordinators of the project. David H. Stratton, then chair of the WSU History Department, was the project director. The project created a traveling exhibit which toured eastern Washington and northern Idaho in 1983 and 1984, a series of lectures given in four locations, and a small booklet about McCroskey, of which 2,500 copies were distributed free to people who viewed the exhibit or attended the lectures.