Gibson, Eva Katharine Clapp (1857-1916). Correspondence, Poems, Stories, Scrapbook of Clippings, 1880-1905 | Illinois History and Lincoln Collections

Eva Katharine Clapp Gibson was an author and poet from Bradford, Ill. Her best-known book was Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch (1901). She lived in Chicago, traveled in Europe in the 1890s, and married Charles Brockway Gibson (University of Illinois, Class of 1877), a chemist. Her stories are mainly set in frontier South Dakota, and these and the poems appeared in a variety of magazines. The correspondence is with her husband's sister, Mary Lee Lockwood. Copies of four of Gibson's published books are also in the Illinois Historical Survey, one of them a unique copy. The only copy of a fifth book, A Dark Secret (1889), is at the Huntington Library; photocopies of the title page and frontispiece are in the Survey. Also in the collection are the only known copies of the sheet music of Walton Perkins, "The Anthem of the Free" (1898), a patriotic march about Spanish-American War soldiers for which Gibson wrote the lyrics.

The materials were given to the Library by Charles or Eva Gibson between 1901 and 1951, and collected by the Survey between 1974 and 2005.