author
Phebe Earle Gibbons
1821–1893
Best known for writing warmly observed essays on Pennsylvania Dutch life, this 19th-century American author brought curiosity, sympathy, and a sharp eye for everyday detail to her work. Raised in a reform-minded Quaker family, she wrote about communities and customs that many of her readers had never seen up close.
1 Audiobook
"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays
by Phebe Earle Gibbons
About the author
Born in Philadelphia on August 9, 1821, Phebe Earle Gibbons grew up in a liberal Quaker family. Sources from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission describe her as the daughter of Thomas Earle and note that her family supported abolition, temperance, women's suffrage, and free public schools. She was educated in Massachusetts schools and taught before her 1845 marriage to Joseph Gibbons of Lancaster County.
Gibbons is remembered chiefly for Pennsylvania Dutch, and Other Essays, first published in 1872, a book that helped introduce many readers to the customs, beliefs, and daily life of Pennsylvania German and Anabaptist communities. Later scholars have noted the importance of her writing as an early, popular account of Pennsylvania Dutch culture, especially because she approached her subjects with unusual interest and care for the period.
She died in 1893. Though not widely known today, her work still matters as a lively mix of social observation, travel writing, and cultural history, and it remains available through projects such as Project Gutenberg.