Appalachian Figures
On the edge of the main academic quad at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, a glass fronted performing arts complex carries a Kentucky name. The Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts began life in 1967 as a new Fine Arts Center, built with a six hundred seat theater and practice studios. When the college president who had championed it retired in 1970, the trustees renamed the building in his honor.
Most institutional biographies begin with that two decade presidency from 1950 to 1970, a period when Washington College doubled its campus, faculty, and endowment while enrollment climbed from roughly three hundred to around eight hundred students. Yet the man whose name anchors that arts center grew up not on the Eastern Shore of Maryland but in the Appalachian border town of Middlesboro, Kentucky, a planned coal and railroad city sitting just west of Cumberland Gap.
Tracing Daniel Zachary Gibson’s life from Middlesboro to Chestertown means threading together obituaries, college catalogs, alumni magazines, court cases, birding newsletters, and family reminiscences. It also means untangling another “D. Z. Gibson” in Middlesboro’s records, a local undertaker who was already active when the future college president was a child. Together, these documents sketch a family that moved from small town Appalachian commerce into mid twentieth century academic leadership, while keeping deep ties to birds, music, and the arts.
Middlesboro Roots And A Name That Echoes
According to both institutional biographies and a family history written by one of his children, Daniel Zachary Gibson was born on 26 January 1908 in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and attended secondary school there before leaving for college. Later obituaries in papers like the Washington Post and The Morning News of Wilmington would summarize that mountain origin in a single phrase, usually “born in Middlesboro, Ky.,” before rushing ahead to his degrees and presidencies.
Middlesboro’s own records, however, preserve a more complicated story about the Gibson name. A Bell County death register transcription for Mary Carroll, who died in the Yellow Creek area on 26 February 1929, lists the burial at Yellow Creek Cemetery and names “Undertaker, D Z Gibson, Middlesboro Ky.” More than a decade earlier, a Kentucky Court of Appeals decision, Smith’s Adm’x v. Middlesboro Electric Co., records trial testimony from “D. Z. Gibson,” described as a “graduated embalmer of dead bodies” who had examined an electrocuted man and was asked to testify about the cause of death.
By 1920, Kentucky Ancestors’ reprint of an old Pineville newspaper obituary for banker L. K. Rice notes that he left “a daughter, Mrs. D. Z. Gibson,” living in Middlesboro. Later Powell Valley News issues from the 1950s refer to “Mrs. D. Z. Gibson” presiding over club meetings and appearing in social columns around the Cumberland Gap region.
Taken together, these sources point to an older adult “D. Z. Gibson” who was already a working embalmer and business partner by the mid 1910s, and to a Mrs. D. Z. Gibson active in local civic life by 1920. That timeline makes it impossible to equate the undertaker with the 1908 born future president. Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that Daniel Zachary Gibson of Washington College belonged to a Middlesboro Gibson line in which the initials “D. Z.” had already been in use, perhaps for an earlier Daniel who entered the funeral trade. The precise relationship remains a problem for genealogists to solve, but the trail of undertaker notices, court cases, and social columns firmly anchors the Gibson family in Bell County’s commercial and professional class during the early twentieth century.
Kentucky Wesleyan, Cincinnati, And A Marriage In Music
Like many ambitious Appalachian students of his generation, Gibson left southeastern Kentucky for a Methodist related liberal arts college. Biographical summaries in institutional histories and the Washington College archives blog agree that he earned his bachelor’s degree from Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1929.
He then moved up the Ohio River to the University of Cincinnati, completing a master’s degree in English in 1931 and a doctorate in English literature in 1939, all while teaching at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Those years in Cincinnati would shape both his scholarly path and his personal life. An institutional obituary for his wife, Helen Schaefer Gibson, notes that she was born in Gary, Indiana in 1912, studied music at Ohio University, and then earned a master’s in music at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory. While she was a student there she met “Daniel Z. Gibson, an English professor and doctoral candidate,” and they married in 1936.
Another obituary, this one for her sister Mary Elizabeth Schaefer Gregory, fills out the Schaefer side of the story and identifies “Mrs. Daniel Z. Gibson of Chestertown, Maryland” as one of Mary’s surviving sisters. Together with Helen’s memorial, this confirms that the Gibsons’ move east from Ohio to Pennsylvania and Maryland was part of a broader pattern of highly educated Midwestern siblings whose careers carried them well beyond their hometown on the Ohio River.
For Appalachian historians, Gibson’s Cincinnati years are a reminder that the route from mountain towns like Middlesboro into the mid twentieth century professoriate often ran through urban, industrial cities such as Cincinnati or Louisville. The combination of a Kentucky Wesleyan degree and a University of Cincinnati doctorate in English set him on a path quite different from the coal and commercial work that sustained many of his Bell County contemporaries, yet his later obituaries never ceased to identify him as “a native of Middlesboro, Ky.”
The Citadel, World War II, And Franklin & Marshall
By 1940, Gibson had taken his first major faculty post at a military college. The 1941 catalog of The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, lists “Second Lieutenant Daniel Zachary Gibson, A.B. Kentucky Wesleyan; M.A., Ph.D. University of Cincinnati” as an assistant professor of English, firmly documenting both his degrees and his rank on the eve of American entry into the Second World War.
In 1943 he resigned that position to accept a commission in the United States Naval Reserve. During the war he was assigned to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he served as executive officer of the college’s Navy V 12 training unit. After the war, Franklin & Marshall alumni publications record that he stayed on as an associate professor of English and quickly moved into administration as dean of the college.
A Penn State dissertation on liberal arts colleges in the 1940s, drawing heavily on Franklin & Marshall archival records, describes Dean Daniel Z. Gibson helping to manage the complex transition from wartime Navy training to peacetime enrollment under the G.I. Bill. He appears there as a key figure in discussions about curriculum, classroom space, and the balance between returning veterans and traditional undergraduates.
These Franklin & Marshall years honed the skills that would define his later career: translating national policy into local practice, balancing budgets and building projects, and speaking for a small liberal arts college in an era of rapid change. They also linked a man from Bell County, Kentucky to a Pennsylvania German college that had been founded long before Kentucky became a state, illustrating how war service could pull Appalachian born professionals into new institutional networks.
A Kentuckian At Washington College
In 1950 an Associated Press story in the Washington Post announced that Franklin & Marshall’s dean, Dr. Daniel Z. Gibson, had been chosen as the new president of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He arrived on a campus that was small, financially vulnerable, and still very much a regional men’s college. Over the next twenty years, working with trustees and alumni, he oversaw a growth spurt that saw the campus, faculty, and endowment roughly double, while enrollment rose from a prewar figure in the low hundreds to around eight hundred students by the end of his term.
His presidency was not simply about growth. In February 1951, Washington press coverage carried a story headlined “Football Abandoned By Sho’men,” detailing Washington College’s decision to discontinue intercollegiate football. Contemporary accounts and later summaries link that choice to concerns about cost, injuries, and the appropriate place of big time athletics within a small liberal arts culture. President Gibson’s administration instead invested in academics and the arts, eventually building the Fine Arts Center that would bear his name.
In 1953 Washington College hosted President Dwight D. Eisenhower as its commencement speaker. The transcript on the American Presidency Project shows the new president greeting “President Gibson” by name in his opening remarks, then using the address to talk about citizen responsibility and Cold War tensions before a largely student audience. The scene tells us that this son of southeastern Kentucky had become a peer host to the leader of the postwar United States on a colonial era campus overlooking the Chester River.
Washington College yearbooks from the 1950s and 1960s regularly pictured “Daniel Zachary Gibson, Ph.D., President of the College” on their faculty and administration pages, while the student newspaper, The Washington Elm, quoted “Dr. Daniel Z. Gibson, president” explaining curricular reforms such as the late 1950s “Four Course Plan” that reshaped the college’s academic calendar. Archival finding aids for the “Washington College Presidents’ papers, Daniel Z. Gibson papers” note that his surviving files include accreditation reports, enrollment records, and extensive material on civil rights and anti war issues, underscoring how his tenure coincided with desegregation and Vietnam era student protest.
By the time health problems forced his resignation in 1970, Gibson had guided Washington College through two turbulent decades in American higher education. A short stint as a dean at Salisbury State College (now Salisbury University) followed, but his public legacy remained tied to Washington College, the arts center that bore his name, and the students who had studied there while the country wrestled with civil rights and war.
Birds, Community, And The Eastern Shore
Obituaries and institutional sketches emphasize Gibson’s administrative work, yet smaller sources reveal another side of his life in Maryland. A Kent County contact list in the birding journal Maryland Birdlife lists “Daniel Z. Gibson, 109 Water St., Chestertown” with a local phone number, identifying him as a point person for ornithological observations in the county.
The Baltimore Sun’s obituary for “Daniel Z. Gibson, educator” notes that he belonged to the Kent County chapter of the Maryland Ornithological Society. Taken together, these suggest that the retired college president spent time in the field watching birds along the Chester River and surrounding marshes, joining a long tradition of amateur naturalists who combined intellectual work with close attention to local ecosystems. For a man who grew up in a town one mile west of Cumberland Gap and later presided over a college in Tidewater Maryland, birding offered a way to stay grounded in the physical landscapes around him.
His interest in literature and the arts likewise extended beyond the classroom. A 1980 article in a Colorado newspaper about an “obscure literary prize” records a retired Dr. Gibson commenting on the importance of pairing literary recognition with substantial monetary awards so that writers could continue their work, giving us a small glimpse of his views on how institutions should support creative labor.
Illness, Loss, And The Gibson Center For The Arts
In April 1984, obituaries in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and other papers announced that Daniel Zachary Gibson, seventy six, had died in Chestertown’s Kent and Queen Anne’s Hospital after a struggle with Parkinson’s disease. They summarized a life that had moved from Middlesboro to Cincinnati, Charleston, Lancaster, Chestertown, and Salisbury, marking his service as a Navy officer in World War II and his long Washington College presidency.
Two decades later, Washington College marked the passing of Helen Schaefer Gibson, the college’s former “First Lady,” in a detailed institutional obituary. It recalled how, after moving to Chestertown in 1950 when her husband became president, she co founded the Washington College Concert Series and helped bring a new level of arts programming to both campus and town. Her advocacy, the notice observed, was one reason the performing arts center built during the Gibson years had been named for Daniel.
The college’s 2024 archives blog revisited that story, explaining how the Fine Arts Center grew out of the 1960s Heritage Campaign, opened in 1967 with a modern theater, and was renamed the Gibson Center for the Arts when he retired in 1970. It also described the 2009 renovation that added the Kohl Gallery and Hotchkiss Recital Hall, transforming the complex into a more open, light filled hub of campus arts. For visitors walking across the brick plaza today, the name “Daniel Z. Gibson” etched into glass and brick serves as a quiet reminder that the building honors a Kentuckian whose career linked Appalachian beginnings with Eastern Shore institutions.
Reading A Kentucky Life In The Archives
For genealogists and local historians, Gibson’s story offers several lessons about how to reconstruct Appalachian lives that extend far beyond the mountains. Obituaries and institutional histories provide the backbone of his biography, but the texture comes from less obvious sources: a Citadel catalog entry that documents his degrees and early faculty role, Franklin & Marshall alumni notes that trace his transition from Navy V 12 officer to dean, court cases and death records that reveal an earlier Middlesboro undertaker with the same initials, and birding directories that capture his post presidential life as an amateur naturalist.
The existence of two “D. Z. Gibsons” in Bell County records, one a funeral director active by 1915 and the other a college president born in 1908, illustrates both the dangers and possibilities of tracing Appalachian families where names repeat across generations. Rather than collapsing the two men into one, the surviving sources suggest a multi generational Gibson family that moved from the funeral and banking networks of Pineville and Middlesboro into the interlocking worlds of higher education, music, and the arts.
At the same time, Gibson’s path from Middlesboro to the presidency of Washington College complicates simple stories about Appalachian “brain drain” or isolation. His education and career carried him into national conversations about liberal arts education, federal aid, civil rights, and campus protest. Yet his roots remained firmly in an Appalachian border town where another D. Z. Gibson had once driven through deep snow to embalm flu victims and where Rices, Gibsons, and other families linked Bell County to wider markets and institutions.
For AppalachianHistorian.org, the story of Daniel Zachary Gibson is not just the tale of a college president whose name appears on a modern arts center. It is also a reminder that people born in coalfield and railroad towns like Middlesboro could become key players in national educational debates while still carrying the imprint of the mountains with them, whether in the cadence of their speech, their affection for birds, or the family names that echo through local newspapers and court records.
Sources & Further Reading
Washington College Archives & Special Collections, “Washington College Presidents’ papers, Daniel Z. Gibson papers (WAC 003 008),” finding aid describing administrative records, accreditation reports, and files on civil rights and anti war issues from Gibson’s presidency. Washington College
“Honoring Prominent Figures in Campus History: The Gibson Center for the Arts,” Washington College Archives blog, 9 April 2024, summarizing Gibson’s education, Washington College presidency, and the history of the Fine Arts Center and its renaming as the Gibson Center for the Arts. Washington College
“Daniel Gibson, Ex President of Md. College, Dies,” Washington Post, 25 April 1984, obituary giving his Middlesboro birth, degrees, wartime service, Franklin & Marshall deanship, Washington College presidency, and death from Parkinson’s disease. The Washington Post
“Daniel Z. Gibson, educator, dies,” The Baltimore Sun, 25 April 1984, obituary emphasizing his Washington College presidency and membership in the Kent County chapter of the Maryland Ornithological Society. Newspapers+1
“Daniel Z. Gibson,” Wikipedia and related Military Wiki entry, synthesizing obituaries and Fred W. Dumschott’s institutional history Washington College to outline his birth in Middlesboro, education at Kentucky Wesleyan and the University of Cincinnati, appointments at The Citadel and Franklin & Marshall, Washington College presidency, brief service at Salisbury State, and death in Chestertown. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
Catalog of The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, 1940 41, listing “Second Lieutenant Daniel Zachary Gibson, A.B. Kentucky Wesleyan; M.A., Ph.D. University of Cincinnati – Assistant Professor of English,” documenting his early faculty appointment and academic credentials. Internet Archive
Franklin & Marshall Alumnus, various issues in the mid and late 1940s, including the “Calling All Alumni” column that notes “Daniel Z. Gibson, former executive officer of the Navy V 12 unit at Franklin and Marshall, is serving as an associate professor of English,” and later pieces describing his work as dean. F&M Digital+1
Maryland Birdlife, 1970s issues, Kent County contact listings showing “Daniel Z. Gibson, 109 Water St., Chestertown” as a local contact, along with related Maryland Ornithological Society materials. Digital Commons+1
Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 45, Number 1, reprinting a 1920 obituary for Pineville banker L. K. Rice and noting his daughter “Mrs. D. Z. Gibson” in Middlesboro; together with Bell County death registers and Kentucky Court of Appeals cases (such as Smith’s Adm’x v. Middlesboro Electric Co.) that document an earlier undertaker and businessman named D. Z. Gibson in Middlesboro. YUMPU+2Kykinfolk+2
Washington College News, “In Memoriam: Helen Gibson, Former First Lady of Washington College,” 8 July 2005, obituary describing Helen Schaefer Gibson’s musical education, marriage to Daniel Z. Gibson, move to Chestertown in 1950, and long advocacy for the arts, including co founding the Washington College Concert Series. Washington College News+1