The Gibbs
An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp
Religion and religious observances in our operation had pretty much to shift for themselves. In the Gibbs schoolhouse, four miles away, Sunday- school sessions were held. Shepherd, eight miles to the south and west, had the usual small-village quota of religious denominations holding religious services.
In the Gibbs neighborhood, the problems of Sunday services were simple. The community was made up entirely of small farmers who had an attitude toward their immediate religious
needs as clear as was their feeling toward civic obligations.
Except for our immediate family, the population was never a settled one. Our lumberjacks came from varied religious backgrounds and were in camp but a few months each year. None of our jacks had ever married or were interested in fraternal groups: It is clear that no institution pertaining to these interests could have claimed the interest of our men.
People of the Gibbs settlement, hailing to a man from “York State,” remained New Yorkers in manner, speech and customs. Solid, upright folks who showed little interest in timber and timber operations, they viewed with a good deal of amused tolerance the rather roisterous ways of our lumberjacks.
Just why the Gibbs families moved into this particular spot in the first place on the Black River, provided they were determined upon settlement in Greendale, was clear enough: They
hit upon the largest area of arable land in the town- ship. Land on the river bottoms
produced good yields of oats and other grains, and back from the river were areas that could produce decent yields. Otherwise, the land around them was like the rest of Greendale: white sand that had no bottom until hardpan was reached, and hard might lie eight, ten feet and even more below the surface.
The Gibbs families formed the heart of the settlement, but in one way or another the other families were related to them. The head of the family was Truman, known far and wide as Old Man Gibbs — in the woods all men over say sixty years of age were Old Man This or Old Man That.