Tobias Gibson

In 1799 Tobias Gibson answered Bishop Francis Asbury's call for a volunteer to go to the Natchez Mission. He sold his horse in Nashville and went down three rivers by canoe and flatboat, arriving that summer to start Mississippi's first Methodist church. He once pulled Asbury out of the Catawba River. He rode an estimated 100,000 miles on circuits from South Carolina to Kentucky. He was engaged to Sarah Griffing, but his health failed and they never married. He preached his last sermon on New Year's Day 1804 and died of tuberculosis on April 5.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — 3.6 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 4.2 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 5.4 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 29 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.

More markers nearby

• Vicksburg Siege — 0.6 mi
• U.S. African Brigade — 2.0 mi
• Freedmen Fight at Milliken's Bend — 2.0 mi
• Grant's Canal — 2.0 mi