Ramsey County History – Summer 2004: “Spring Wagons and No Roads: A Gibbs Daughter Remembers a Pioneer Family’s Sunday as a ‘Serious Undertaking’”

Spring Wagons and No Roads: A Gibbs Daughter Remembers a Pioneer Family’s Sunday as a ‘Serious Undertaking’
Author: Lillie Gibbs LeVesconte

This is a reminiscence of the youngest daughter of Heman and Jane Gibbs. She recalls that getting to church services was no easy task in the 1870s. It meant traveling in the family’s two-seated spring wagon more than three miles, with no available public road. The Gibbs family attended a Methodist church in northeast St. Anthony, where LeVesconte vividly remembers hearing a visiting woman evangelist and how cold the little church was in the winter. Shortly afterward, there was a road to the church—today’s Como Avenue.
PDF of LesVesconte article