Sacramento County
Biographies
JAMES A. GIBSON
JAMES A. GIBSON.--A New Yorker who has made good as a dairyman in the Golden State, is James A. Gibson, of Wilton, who was born on January 11, 1855, in Brooklyn, across East River from the American metropolis. His father, Alexander Gibson, a native of the North of Ireland, married Miss Jennie Davis, also from that country; and as a hard-working laborer he sought to provide for a family of ten children, two of whom are still living, James and William. Mr. Gibson passed away at the age of forty-five, and his devoted wife at thirty-five, in Kane County, Ill., whither they had moved in 1856.
When James Gibson was eleven years old, he started out to make his own way in the world. He soon found that he had to work hard, commencing on dairy ranches; and he has followed dairying more or less ever since. He grew up in Kane County, Ill., and worked on farms near Elgin, and for three years drove a milk wagon in Chicago. In 1874 he came West to the Pacific Coast, and on reaching California, settled in Sacramento County; and since then he has spent all of the intervening years within eighteen or twenty miles of his present home at Wilton. He purchased sixty-four and one-half acres of land near Wilton Station, and there he has carried on general farming, with a dairy of about twenty-five cows. He is a Republican in matters of national political moment, but a good non-partisan booster for everything of paramount concern to Wilton and Sacramento County. He is a past grand of the Odd Fellows, and is also a member of the Knights of Pythias Lodge at Galt. Both he and Mrs. Gibson are members of the Rebekah Lodge.
Mr. Gibson was married for the first time at Sacramento, in September, 1883, when he became the husband of Miss May Derr, a native of Elk Grove and the daughter of Henry Derr, who was a farmer. One son, Percy Gibson, blessed this union. In the same city, in October, 1890, Mr. Gibson was married to Mrs. Margaret Bell, who was born in San Joaquin County, the daughter of Patrick Gleason. He was a pioneer merchant of Stockton; and his wife, Mrs. Gibson's mother, died when Margaret was an infant. Another son blessed this second marriage, Elmer C., who assisted his father in agricultural pursuits, and is now foreman of a ranch at Clarksburg. He married Miss Madge Iola Hooper, a native of Humboldt County, California, and the daughter of William and Effie Hooper. They have one son, James.
Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
Source: Reed, G.
Walter, History of Sacramento County, California
With Biographical Sketches, Page 783. Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, CA.
1923.
© 2007 Jeanne Taylor.