Jan Gibson and the Shack

Everyone who cares for a piece of land has a story to tell.  Jan Gibson told me about the shack she came across back in 1971.  It sat under an oak tree on 2 acres west of Toledo, Ohio.   At the time she was a single mother with six kids, one step from a homeless shelter.  She noticed it had a for-sale sign. Temporary shelter, she thought.  But the sign was for the entire lot, not just the shack.   The price was $6,000.  That gave Jan an idea. She offered all she had to her name; made the deal, and lived with the kids in the 10x20-foot shack, with no heat or running water, while the first stage of a modular house was being built on the lot.  Jan and I sat at the kitchen table of that house as she told me how she how she got on her feet after that first summer living in the shack with her kids.

This spunky woman not only saved her family, her maternal instincts led her to save a native plant community growing in the back of the lot. It was a black oak lupine barren, one of the rare ecosystems of the fabled Oak Openings region west of Toledo.    

 As a survivor herself, Gibson went on to become a leading advocate for saving the savannas, wet prairies, and other threatened ecosystems on private property in the region. 

Jan hadn’t read The Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, but I couldn’t help think about the connection between the shack where she once lived with her kids, and the shack where Leopold parked his family.  Natural resources benefitted in both cases.

Photo: © Woodlands & Prairies Magazine
Single mom Jan Gibson saved her family and the oak savanna in her back yard.