Alexander Gibson

Alexander "Boss" Gibson (1 August 1820 – 14 August 1913) was a Canadian industrialist in New Brunswick, Canada. His business interests included sawmills, railways, and a cotton mill. He founded the company town of Marysville, New Brunswick.

Early life Alexander Gibson was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick on 1 August 1820. He was the first of seven children born to John Gibson and his wife Mary Jane Johnson, who had immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1818, accompanied by John Gibson's parents, Alexander Gibson Sr. and Janet Moore, brothers James and Stuart, and sister Margaret. During Alexander Gibson's childhood in the 1820s the family lived in a log house and farmed six acres of land. Gibson's grandfather seems not to have been poor, as he speculated modestly in land in St. Andrews until about 1825, when he applied for and was granted a 60-acre tract of farmland in Oak Bay, near St. Stephen, selling two 20-acre lots and reserving the easternmost portion for his own family. John Gibson, the Boss's father, is given as "shoemaker" on his son's baptismal record, but became a farmer upon the move to Oak Bay.

Baptismal record for Alexander Gibson, August 6, 1820, with accompanying birth record. Courtesy All Saints Church, St. Andrews, NB

Gibson married Mary Ann Robinson on 31 December 1843. She had been born in County Donegal, Ireland in 1827, two years before her parents emigrated to Canada and settled in Baillie Settlement, one of many tiny farming communities surrounding St. Stephen and Milltown, little more that what one commentator described as "windows in the forest.". Alexander Gibson and his wife were to have twelve children, of whom six lived to adulthood.

Sawmills and lumbering Alexander Gibson went to work in the sawmills in Milltown, New Brunswick, first as a laborer, then as sawyer and later mill manager.

In 1862 Gibson left Charlotte County and purchased land and a sawmill operation on the Nashwaak River near Fredericton. A company directed by Robert Rankin owned the operation, which was failing because of poor management and had been offered for sale for several years before Gibson purchased it for £7,300. The property included sawmills, a gristmill, a store, a blacksmith shop, and "a number of houses well suited for workmen", as well as a farm and 7,000 acres of woodland. The purchase price also included the right to float logs and rafts down the Nashwaak River to its mouth in the Saint John River across from the city of Fredericton.

Gibson immediately began to improve and expand the operation. He enlarged the mill pond by putting a chain of piers across the river above an existing dam, and built more dams in order to improve the flow of logs to his sawmills. He also renovated the mills, outfitting them with double gang saws, and brought in experienced workers from Lepreau to run them. In the spring of 1863 the mills began sawing 3 inch planks, called deals, which were floated to a log boom at the mouth of the Nashwaak. They were then taken on lighters or rafts down the Saint John River to the port of Saint John, New Brunswick, and thence to the British or American markets.

Gibson's second railway venture was as a director, and later president, of the New Brunswick Land and Railway Company, which received a provincial government charter in 1870 to build a line north to Edmundston. The province granted the company 10,000 acres of crown land per mile of track, for a total of 1,647,772 acres of forested land. The charter stipulated that construction must start in three years, with completion in eight years. After two years of unsuccessful efforts by the company to raise money in England to finance construction, Gibson offered to pay one quarter of the cost. Gibson took over as president of the company and with the granting of another $225,000 by city and county governments, construction began in May 1872. The railway, which was called the "Gibson Line" reached Edmundson in 1878. Its southern terminus was at the village of Gibson (named after Alexander Gibson) on the north bank of the Saint John River near the mouth of the Nashwaak. The mill, which was designed by Lockwood, Greene & Co. of Providence, Rhode Island, had four storeys and was 418 feet long by 100 feet wide. It had steam heat and a sprinkler system as fire protection. Its 800 carbon arc electric lights were the first in the Fredericton area. Gibson paid the minister's and organist's salaries and gave each choir member an annual stipend. The cotton mill building received a separate National Historic Site designation in 1986.

Later years and legacy The Canadian cotton textile industry, including Gibson's enterprise, soon ran into difficulties. These included a shortage of skilled workers, competition for raw materials, and dependence on imported technology. Most serious was that the market could not support the amount of cotton cloth produced by all the mills. Gibson refused to join a trade association organized as early as 1886 to try to prevent overproduction, but in 1892 he agreed to market all his production through the Canadian Colored Cotton Mills Company Limited of Montreal.

Through the 1890s, also, his lumber export business became less profitable, due to the increasing age of his mills and the declining supply of suitable lumber on his land. His wife had predeceased him in 1898. The Gibson family plot in the Alexander Gibson Memorial Cemetery in Fredericton was recognized as a local historic place in 2010.