About 1850 she was purchased by William Barton Rogers, a professor of natural philosophy (science) at the University who later founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was his family's cook until 1853.

[5] She and her husband were freed when General Philip Sheridan's troops reached Charlottesville, bringing the Emancipation Proclamation with them, on March 3, 1865 (see Liberation and Freedom Day).

Although the mother of several children, whom she must aid in supporting, she wishes to perfect her own education and become a teacher of her people.

She is doubly precious to our hearts, as the devoted nurse of one of the noblest and best-beloved of our young officers, who died a prisoner in rebel hands.

[9] The only known writing of Isabella is the following letter, published in the journal of the charity providing support to schools for freedmen, the New England Freedman's Aid Society.

Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the [manacles], the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness?

ISABELLA GIBBINS[10]The sentences with italic added were inscribed in the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.