Frederick H. Gibbens

Those of us who met Frederick Hammond Gibbens in the serenity of his later days, who associated with his personality the lively interest which he displayed in contemporary men and things, found it hard to imagine that he had lived through ninety years. His easy manners, with their touch of formal but always kindly courtesy, certainly won him the nowadays not very common distinction, gentleman of the old school. It was a background which gave a pleasing color to remembrance of his own longer past. Occasional reminiscence of the kind by Gibbens brought to the listener the sense of somehow being himself translated into those older and simpler days.

Gibbens was a railroad officer in the Seventies and Eighties, when operating managers fought their battles on the road, but when the head office at New York was an establishment quite in touch with amenities of social life. Traditions of his railway’s old régime had an uncommon hold upon him. Treasurer during thirty years after 1870 in the highly conservative Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the eventual shortening of its title (under a new management) to “Lackawanna” on time tables and cars, appeared to him distinct impairment of dignity. The cult of Phœbe Snow, in the road’s new publicity literature, was alluded to reluctantly and deprecatingly, as a misstep in the family circle. In his secret heart Gibbens never lost regret for by-gone days when the Sam Sloan management insisted, as a matter of principle and practice, that it was not right to run railway trains on Sunday.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook