The elder J.C. Gibson enlisted twice in J.R. Gilbert's company of Virginia militia for service in the War of 1812, in July 1813 and January 1814.

He eventually rose in the local militia, and when General Lafayette traveled to visit President Madison at his estate, Montpelier in nearby Orange in 1824, Major Gibson led a mounted fifty man volunteer escort.

[2] Following the war, Gibson returned to farm using enslaved labor, as well as practice law in Culpeper County (slightly north of Albemarle but still in Virginia's Piedmont region).

[3][4][5] In a contested election in 1830, J.C. Gibson Sr. defeated incumbent Joseph S. Hansbrough to represent Culpeper County part-time in the Virginia House of Delegates, serving alongside Edmund Broadus.

[9] The Huntington Library in California has some papers relating to Gibson, transferred through his daughter Frances, who married twice, both to Alabamians and whose daughter Martha (a/k/a "Mattie") would marry Issac Jordon Stone, who moved his family to North Carolina and ultimately California, where his mother-in-law lived her final years.