Alexander Gibson (industrialist)

Alexander Gibson
Alexander Gibson in 1870
Born	(1820-08-01)1 August 1820 Oak Bay, New Brunswick
Died	14 August 1913(1913-08-14) (aged 94) Marysville, New Brunswick
Resting place	Alexander Gibson Memorial Cemetery
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	Lumber merchant, Industrialist
Known for	Marysville cotton mill
Spouse(s)	Mary Ann Robinson (1843—1898)
Children	Alexander Gibson Jr.

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

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. The grandparents seem both to have been born in Scotland, but all of the children were of Irish birth. Unlike the waves of poor Irish who were beginning to land in the Maritimes (St. Andrews alone landed several thousands between 1817 and 1818), Gibson's grandfather seems not to have been poor, as he speculated modestly in land in St. Andrews until bout 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.

Gibson married Mary Ann Robinson on 31 December 1843. She had been born in 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.

Alexander Gibson went to work in the sawmills in Milltown, New Brunswick, first as a laborer, then as sawyer and later mill manager. He became an expert at managing water-powered mills using the innovative gang saws which were first used in the area in the 1840s. In the 1850s, with an American partner, Gibson leased a sawmill and water rights on the Lepreau River in Charlotte County, New Brunswick.