A TOWN WITH PITY - Anyone who saw her couldn't help but pity poor Mrs. Milly Gibson. With no one to care for her, Milly was relegated to be an inmate of the Laurens County Almshouse. It was truly a shame. Here was a woman whose skull bones had been for years gradually gaping open at both the longitudinal and transverse sutures. Only the skin of her head kept her brains from oozing out of her skull. Puzzled physicians could take her pulse by placing their fingers in the fissures.
To keep her brain inside her head, Mrs. Gibson kept a kerchief tightly bound around her head fearing that it would burst open when the band was removed, even for a short time. In spite of her problems, she was considered to be as nimble as a cricket.
By the summer of 1880, Mrs. Gibson began to fail. On the 4th of July, she was still cooking a mess of vittles with the best of any cook in the county. Dr. Harrison reported to the Dublin Gazette that Milly "was drawn into a semicircle and cannot stand at all, and she can lie only about two hours in twenty-four." The 90-year-old woman did not weigh more than forty or fifty pounds, the approximate weight of her worn skin and crumbling bones, all of which were plainly visible. Her skull crevices continued to widen, causing blindness and bleeding through her nose. Mrs. Gibson told Dr. Harrison that she felt as if every bone in her body was broken.
On September 11, 1880, the torture mercifully ended. Mrs. Gibson was probably buried in the poor farm cemetery on the grounds of the Southern Pines Complex. Finally at peace, Milly Gibson was characterized as a 50-year opium eater, a 73-year inveterate smoker, and a 70-year member of the Methodist Church. Dublin Post, Sept. 10, 1879, Sept. 15, 1880, Macon Telegraph, Aug. 8, 11, 13, 1880.
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