My Genealogy Hound

WILLIAM W. GIBSON. One of the oldest settlers of Gibbon township, as he is one of the most industrious and highly esteemed citizens of the township, is William W. Gibson, the subject of this sketch. Mr. Gibson is a brother of A. F. Gibson, of the town of Gibbon, a sketch of whom appears in this work, in which sketch will be found the facts pertaining to the ancestral history so far as they are of interest or value to this record.

William W. Gibson was born in Lawrence county, Pa., August 7, 1845, and was reared in his native place, growing up on the farm, receiving a common school education in the district schools of the community where he was reared, and being trained also to the habits of industry and usefulness that mark the farmer’s life. He enlisted in the Union army at the age of twenty, entering February 1, 1865, as a member of Company B, One Hundredth Pennsylvania infantry. He saw his chief service in front of Petersburg, Va., participating in the siege of that place and taking part in the mine engagement. In this siege he was severely wounded in the right wrist by a fragment of a mortar shell. He was in the service till July 27, 1865, being mustered out at Harrisburg on that date. He served as a private and had the good fortune never to be captured or wounded. He belonged to a historic regiment, the old Hundredth being known also as the “Roundheads” and proving themselves worthy upon many a battle-field of their historic name. The regiment was present at twenty-three of the principal battles of the war, in only four of which it did not take an active part. It lost in killed and wounded eight hundred and eighty-seven men out of a total enlistment of two thousand and fourteen, all but twenty-nine of its losses occurring in actual conflict in the field, twenty-nine being the number that was lost in Confederate prisons. The number killed outright in open engagements was two hundred and twenty-four, being a little over eleven per cent. It fought in widely separated localities and made long journeys by sea and land.

Returning to Lawrence county when the war was over, Mr. Gibson settled down to farming and remained there till the spring of 1871, when he in company with his brother, A. F. Gibson, joined the Soldier’s Free Homestead Colony and came to Nebraska, settling in Gibbon township, where he took a homestead and has since remained. Mr. Gibson’s place lies about a mile north of the town of Gibbon, being the northeast quarter of section 12, township 9, range 13 west. He has resided on this place for more than nineteen years, taking it when it was a raw prairie bearing fresh marks of the buffalo, which had only a few years previously roamed over it undisturbed. It is now well improved, half of it being under cultivation and the remainder in pasture, furnished with comfortable buildings and ornamented with groves, natural and artificial. For several years after coming to the state, Mr. Gibson lived a bachelor, having too much regard for the tender feelings and gentle nature of the opposite sex to ask any woman to share with him the hardships and privations which fell to his lot in the earlier years. But with the improvement of his worldly condition, the gradual settlement of the country and the appearance of better times, he got the consent of his mind to change his lot of single blessedness, and, as was most natural in such a case, his eyes reverted to his old home in Lawrence county, Pa. In 1878, February 13th, he led to the marriage altar Miss Virginia McGary of that county, a lady whom he had known from early childhood, she, like himself, being a native of that county. Mrs. Gibson comes of Pennsylvania parentage, his father, John McGary, having been born and reared in Lawrence county, where he always lived and where he died in 1875 at the age of sixty-two, and her mother, a native of Armstrong county and still living, being a resident of Lawrence county. Mrs. Gibson is one of a family of twelve children, of whom, besides herself, two daughters and one son reside in Buffalo county, viz. — Mrs. Mary Thompson, Miss Nan E. McGary, and James McGary. Mr. and Mrs. Gibson have only one child, John M., a bright, intelligent boy, around whom their chief hopes and ambitions gather, and who gives every evidence of being the realization of their fondest expectations.