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.

She had been born in County 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.".

In the 1850s, with an American partner, Gibson leased a sawmill and water rights on the Lepreau River in Charlotte County, New Brunswick.

[3] In 1862 Gibson left Charlotte County and purchased land and a sawmill operation on the Nashwaak River near Fredericton.

A company directed by Robert Rankin owned the operation, which was failing because of poor management and had been offered for sale for several years before Gibson purchased it for £7,300.

The property included sawmills, a gristmill, a store, a blacksmith shop, and "a number of houses well suited for workmen", as well as a farm and 7,000 acres of woodland.

He also renovated the mills, outfitting them with double gang saws, and brought in experienced workers from Lepreau to run them.

In the spring of 1863 the mills began sawing 3 inch planks, called deals, which were floated to a log boom at the mouth of the Nashwaak.

[6]: 23  At times his wood production accounted for more than half of the goods exported annually from the port of Saint John.

When it opened in November 1867 it joined the Western Extension of the European and North American Railway which ran from Maine to Saint John, New Brunswick.

After two years of unsuccessful efforts by the company to raise money in England to finance construction, Gibson offered to pay one quarter of the cost.

In 1893 Gibson bought out his partner Jabez Bunting Snowball and became sole owner of the company, which had become the Canada Eastern Railway in 1890.

[3] Raw cotton from the United States started arriving at Marysville in 1885 and the mill was in full production by the end of 1889, employing 500 people by 1893.

[7]: 93 When Gibson arrived at his newly purchased property on the Nashwaak in 1862 he found poor sanitation and endemic typhoid fever.

Gibson had the site cleaned up and then built a new model village to accommodate the mill workers and their families, calling it Marysville after his wife and his eldest daughter, both of whom were named Mary.

[12] Gibson refused to join a trade association organized as early as 1886 to try to prevent overproduction, but in 1892 he agreed to market all his production through the Canadian Colored Cotton Mills Company Limited of Montreal.

[14] His Family Plot in the Alexander Gibson Memorial Cemetery, 351 Canada Street, Fredericton was declared an Historic Place in 2010.