James Monroe Gibson, Sr., was born in 1821. He married his cousin, Martha E. Gibson, the daughter of early Warren County, Mississippi, settler Randall Gibson, on August 4, 1842. The couple had three children: Randall Gibson (b. November 7, 1843), David D. Gibson (b. June 11, 1845), and Winfield Scott Gibson (b. August 27, 1847). Martha Gibson died on March 19, 1849.

Gibson owned a plantation in Warren County near Vicksburg. The Gibson plantation house was built by the Weldon brothers in 1849. Originally from Antrim, Ireland, they were the contractors who also built the old courthouse in Vicksburg.

James Monroe Gibson, Sr., married his second wife, Eliza Cordelia Stevens, on June 22, 1851. They also had three children: Kate Lou Gibson (b. June 19, 1852), Jenny Gibson (b. June 1854), and James Monroe Gibson, Jr. (b. July 26, 1856). James Monroe Gibson, Sr., died in 1888.

This collection contains photographs and schoolbooks from the Gibson Plantation in Warren County, Mississippi. There are thirty-one photographs, all portraits. Six of the photographs have been identified. The collection contains one tintype, also a portrait.

The books in the collection are the following: Clerk’s Magazine Containing the Most Useful and Necessary Forms of Writing…(1819), The Principles of English Grammar (1865), Patterson’s Common School Speller (1882), McGuffey’s New Fourth Eclectic Reader (n.d.), and a cookbook. There is a manuscript mathematics textbook that also contains Gibson family information and a list of slaves and the years of their births dating from the early 1840s.

1. Photographs. n.d. 2 folders.
2. Schoolbooks. 1819; 1840s; 1865; 1882; n.d. 6 volumes.