ADDISON CRANDALL GIBBS, OREGON'S WAR GOVERNOR
By MRS. A. C. GIBBS
ADDISON C. GIBBS passed his boyhood on a farm in Western New York. His early education was obtained at the little red schoolhouse on the corner of his father's farm. Later he went to a neighboring village, Springville, where he spent two years. From there he went to Albany and graduated from the State Normal School. He taught in the school at Watertown, devoting his hours out of school to the study of law, until he passed the examination, which entitled him to practice in the courts of the State of New York. His father, Abraham L. Gibbs, of English descent, traced his ancestry back to the three Gibbs brothers who came to America before the Revolution. His mother belonged to a Holland Dutch family. She spent her early life and was educated in Troy, New York, a city which, in those days, boasted of the finest and most advanced school for young ladies in the state. To the circumstance that Rachel Scobey was educated in this school her children felt themselves indebted. Addison was the only son. He had four sisters, who taught district schools until they were married.
In 1851 Addison left his native state for California, where he remained a few months, when he went north to the Umpqua Valley in Oregon. Here he took up a donation land claim on the site now occupied by the City of Gardiner.
One of his first ventures was a contract to carry the United States mail semi-monthly from the Willamette Valley to Umpqua City, at the mouth of the Umpqua River. For immediate service he purchased a cayuse pony and mounted it, with a flour sack for a mail bag. Thus equipped, he carried the first United States mail across the Calapooia Mountains into the Valley of the Umpqua. The mail carrier, who was hailed as he passed the far-apart cabins, stopped and, taking his flour sack mail bag into the cabin, emptied the bag and let each person select his own mail, tied up what wag left and proceeded to the next cabin. This trip, however, he took but once officially, as he sublet the contract.
By President Pierce he was appointed Collector of Customs for the District of Cape Perpetua, which included Coos Bay and the Umpqua River, with the office located at Gardinier. This office he filled until Buchanan was elected to the presidency, when he resigned and moved to Roseburg. During this term of office he visited his old home in New York State and while there was united in marriage, January 10, 1854, to Miss Margaret Watkins, of Springville.
In 1858 Mr. Gibbs came to Portland, where he built a home and devoted his attention to the practice of his profession. He was an active member of the Taylor-Street M. E. Church and was for many years the president of its board of trustees. For a long time he filled the same position on the board of trustees of Willamette University at Salem, Oregon. He represented Umpqua County in the Territorial legislature in 1853, and was a member of the State legislature in 1860. In 1862 he was elected Governor of the state, the duties of which office, made more onerous by the Civil War conditions, he performed with untiring industry and fidelity.
Many people thought Oregon was entirely out of the war zone, but Governor Gibbs secured proof of a rebel conspiracy and for months had men in his employ who reported to him the meetings and doings of certain friends of the Confederacy, who he had good reason to believe were planning to take the undefended State of Oregon out of the Union. The outcome of his vigilance during this period was afterwards described by one of this same band. "Yes, Gibbs got the best of us, and as things have turned out I am glad of it." After the close of the war. Governor Gibbs gave much attention to locating school lands
