Jewett C. (Jewett Castello) Gilson

Born in Vermont in 1844, Jewett Castello Gilson became a teacher while still very young and later spent time studying at Amherst College. He went on to build a long career in education, eventually becoming a superintendent of schools in California.

Gilson is also remembered in Oakland civic history as the first director of Chabot Observatory. Sources about his life describe him as a longtime educator and public-minded advocate for learning, with interests that reached beyond the classroom into science and public culture.

As a writer, he is best known for Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania, a work drawn from material published in National Geographic Magazine. In it, he explored regions often dismissed as barren or unimportant and argued that they played an essential part in the wider life of the world. He died in 1926.