Ramsey County History Winter 2025 – Additional Reading

Additional Reading

For the past sixty-one years, Ramsey County History and the publishing staff of Ramsey County Historical Society have documented the stories of this region through magazine articles and books—occasionally turning inward to examine the people at the center of this very organization. Below is a brief overview of some of the research that has been done into the family who originally occupied the historic Gibbs Farm and the early women like Ethel Stewart who contributed mightily to the legacy of RCHS.

Ramsey County History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1964), 3-5

William L. Cavert, “Sod Shanty on the Prairie: Story of a Pioneer Farmer” 

Ramsey County History 49, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 8-11

Anne Cowie, “Growing Up in St. Paul: The Peripatetic RCHS in the Mid-1970s”

Ramsey County History 4, no. 2 (Fall 1967), 3-7

Anne Cowie, “Marshall Sherman and the Civil War: St. Paul’s First Medal of Honor Winner” 

Ramsey County History 49, no. 3, 22-27

Priscilla Farnham, “Expanding Our Understanding of the Past: The Sod House and Dakota Kin at the Gibbs Museum” 

Ramsey County History 35, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 4-13

Julie A. Humann, “The Two Worlds of Jane Gibbs: The Gibbs Farm and the Santee Dakota”

Ramsey County History 39, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 24-25

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

Ramsey County History 31, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 17-20

Thomond R. O’Brien, “Digging into the Past: The Excavating of the Claim Shanty of Heman and Jane Gibbs” 

St. Paul: Ramsey County Historical Society, 2006

Pearl Marea Schenck, Pearl and the Howling Hound Farm 

Ramsey County History 49, No. 3 (Fall 2014), 17-21

Mollie Spillman, “The RCHS Archives and Collections Since 1964” 

St. Paul: Ramsey County Historical Society, 2022

Terry Swanson, Grasshoppers in My Bed: Lillie Belle Gibbs—Minnesota Farm Girl—1877

Ramsey County History 49, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 3-7

Steven C. Trimble, “In Search of Ethel Stewart,” Ramsey County History 49, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 3-7

Ramsey County History 47, no. 3 (Fall 2012), 3-12

Steven C. Trimble, “Hands-On Historian: Ethel Hall Stewart and Preserving the Gibbs Farm” 

Ramsey County History 31, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 4-16

Deanne Zibell Weber, “A Pioneer Child on Minnesota’s Frontier—Jane Gibbs, the ‘Little Bird that was Caught,’ and Her Dakota Friends”