Niki Giberson: Hands on History

00:00 I am in my workshop in Port Republic. I have a classroom here and a place where I display some of the goods that we make here and do here. I run a folk art school. It's called Swan Bay Folk Art center in Port Republic. And it's also a sheep farm. So there's a lot of different levels to this. I raise sheep. I have a donkey, a retirement donkey who I bought when I retired because I always wanted to. And I have 26 chickens and 14 sheep. And my husband has a rule with the sheep that if they don't pay for themselves, they have to go. So I'm always coming up with new and creative ways to make the wool work. So we knit, spin handspin on a spinning wheel. I get it spun by machine and dye it. I have a garden where I make dies that I dye the wool. So there's that level of it just making the farm work. And then I also make baskets. So yes, you can say I'm a basket case, but I have on my website, which is hands on history.com, there are 94 baskets to choose from. And pre Covid, I had ten people at a time making ten different baskets, which sounds crazy, but it works because not everyone then needs me at the same time. If everyone's making a different basket, they're in a different place. So that I've learned over, I opened up in 1988, and so that's long time that I've been doing this over 30 years. And so I've learned who needs what. And I just run around in my dance space and hand people read. And then about two, two to 3 hours, they have a finished basket that they leave with. And I say that they've spent the time making their own piece of history because it's important to do that. I think.

01:39 I think so, too. I think that's really important. What kind of baskets do you make?

01:43 Oh, all kinds. I do everything from, I have a s'more basket where you can put your chocolate, graham crackers and marshmallows in it to take out to the camp. I do hampers, I do storage baskets, I do decorative baskets, all kinds of, if this was video, I would show you, but I also wood burn designs in wooden bases and weave baskets with those. So all different. Anything that you need a basket for. In fact, we have a level of baskets called clutter busters. So if you have a shelf that you want to fit a basket on the, you just give me the dimensions and you weave the basket to fit on it.

02:20 Oh, well, I'm going to let you know what my dimensions are for my shelf. And you also mentioned that you did gems. I didn't know you made gem jams as well.

02:31 Yeah, I'm Jersey fresh certified. So what that means is all the products that I use are grown in New Jersey, except one jam I put pineapple in, which don't grow in New Jersey, but it makes. It does well with cranberries. So I make about 30 different varieties of jam. I grow my own blackberries, raspberries, grapes, and beach plums. And the rest of it I buy from farmers in New Jersey. My strawberries come from Port Republic. My peaches come from Hamilton. My cranberries come from Tabernacle.

03:04 What inspired you to do all of this?

03:06 I'm actually a third generation jammer. It's something that my grandmother did. My grandmother was an immigrant from Russia, and she had five children, and it was very important that she become self sufficient because her husband had passed away. She always felt that she would jam on the hottest days because then you never notice how hot it is, which seems kind of funny because you're over a stove cooking and boiling water. But she just thought that that was a good thing to do. And then when you're all done, you put them all out on a table and you listen for the jars to pop. And there's something very satisfying about listening to that and being able to grow the fruit and then make it is just. It's very rewarding. Very rewarding. And it tastes good, and you can bless people with it, you know, like, thank you for fixing my heater. Here. Here's your pay. And here's a jar of jam. You know, it's just. Yeah, it's just an extra added blessing.

03:57 So instead of doing felting and making gyms, I also heard that you're the mayor.

04:03 I am the mayor.

04:05 Well, how did that, you know, like, come from baskets and jams to mayor?

04:10 Right. Well, my husband was mayor for 36 years, and he's a bit older than I am, and he decided it was time to retire. So the republican committee came to me and said, would you like to be mayor? And I laughed at them. I said, I just bought my retirement donkey. Why would I want to be mayor? I know what's involved in that. I've had a 36 year long apprenticeship. And then I went home. I started praying about it and just thinking about it, and I thought, well, if I were mayor, I'd want to have a big celebration this year. It's the 375th birthday of Port Republic's founding. 375 years. So I want to have a parade, and I'd want to. I want to love the people. I want to celebrate the people. I want to give a quilt to every baby that's born while I'm mayor. I want to just have the people realize how important they are. And Port Republic is a small town. There's about 450 homes, about 1100 people. It's 8 sq. Mi. So it's a tiny place. It's kind of in the doughnut hole of the Mullica river and Galloway Township. It's just the most beautiful place to live. It really is being right on the mullica. It's in the pine barrens. So we really enjoy life here. It's great for farming because the rain just goes down the Mullica river when it's time. That's the way the weather goes. And so we always have enough water for our plants for the most part, and it's just a great place to live. So after I really thought about it, I thought, you know, I think I can do it. And I've only been mayor now for month and a half. I'm still in the honeymoon stage, but I love every day of it. It's mostly a volunteer job. I get paid $800 a year, and one of my friends told me that's only a little over $15 a week. But I'm okay with that because we have over, I figured out over 10% of our population volunteers to do something here in town, whether it be on a board or the fire company, the PTSD. There's scouting. There's all kinds of things where people just volunteer their time and their. Their talents to make port republic an even better place.

06:07 You know, aside of the parade and the quilts for the first children, what's your first thing you want to do in Port Republic?

06:15 Well, we just got out the first newsletter. That was kind of a big deal because one of the things I wanted to do, I'm the first woman mayor of Port Republic as well. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I can put the slant on it that I'm a woman, you know, so. And I love to cook and bake, and I feed people. My children say that I love people with food. That's how I love people, by giving them food. So one of the things in my newsletter is there's. It's called from the mayor's kitchen. So I put a recipe in there, and I said, there's three things you can do with this recipe. You can either, if you have children or grandchildren, it's a great way. Baking is a great way to teach mathematic. You can do a great math lesson. Like, there's a lot of one cups in this. You can make a third of a cup. How many thirds of a cup do you need? How many quarter cups do you need? Can you use a half and a quarter to make a full cup? That's a good math problem.

07:05 It is. It is.

07:06 Or you can just make yourself a delicious treat, or you can give it to a neighbor and make friends, you know, so there's a little bit of disunity sometimes. And I just want to encourage people to be nice to the people around them. We're planning the parade. That's a big thing right now, just working out the logistics. We have a fire company who usually makes clams, and we have hot dogs and hamburgers, and then we have fireworks at 09:00 so it's going to be like a full day event. So that takes a lot. But we also need to. There's some problems. We need to change a giant drainage ditch, which we're working on that. We have a dam in town. This is pretty cool. In 1774, three men petitioned the king of England to build a dam so they could build a grist mill. And we still have the same dam, but it was rebuilt once in the fifties, and it's about time to rebuild again. So historically, it's important to keep it because we get water from Stockton College and we get water from Egg Harbor City and from us in this lake, and then it goes into a dam. So I'm thinking, can we do hydraulics? Can we do. You know, I'm trying to look into all aspects because something like this is very expensive, and we have a small town, so that's, that's a big deal right now that we're working on, too. But I've been taking classes online, different things about climate change and stormwater drainage, and I'm getting a whole new field of education in this job. But it's interesting. It's all interesting to me, every bit of it.

08:39 How has your life been different than what you imagine?

08:42 Well, I do have office hours I have to go to twice a week, which I like, you know, that's good. It sets a time. It sets the time aside where I can do mayor business, wear my mayor hat, you know, but pretty much, for the most part, I knew what to expect because my husband was mayor for 36 years, so there haven't been really any surprises. I had to go to a county mayor's meeting, and I was a little nervous to go by myself. And then I thought, I've been to these before because I would go with my husband. And when I walked in, it's like everybody was so kind and introduced me to the new people, and I'm like, I'm home. It's good. I can do this. And when I got the donkey, I had plans for the donkey. It wasn't just to have a donkey, because I teach colonial tea parties for children, for little girls. I do birthday parties, and scout troops come. And I thought that the donkey would fit in so well. If there was a basket on the donkey's backs, the juice boxes could be in the donkey, and then they could get their pictures taken. And Scarlet is very sweet. And if it's a pirate party, you dress her up like a pirate. If it's a superhero party, you dress her up like Wonder Woman. So, like, she was going to be part of that. But then Covid hit, so. And she came to me pregnant. That was the other thing. So we had the whole birthing thing, which was great. It was wonderful.

09:55 You got smaller donkeys now?

09:56 Well, I did, but now he has a new home. He was a boy. He was born during our Marvel comic naming session, so his name was Thor. Someone once told me that Thor was great eye candy, so he was eye candy when he was born, so Thor became. That was his name. But he was very. He was a typical boy, very aggressive, very playful. And he would bite his mother's mane and chew off her tail and bite her neck. And she would just say, she was so nice. She'd, like, do whatever you want. So the poor guy and poor girl was being beat up. So I had a friend who had three horses who needed a companion. And now Thor lives with the three horses, and. And he is their boss now. He's the boss, even though he's a third of the size of it. We visited him on his birthday, and we visit him, and also she posts videos of him all the time. And he's so adorable. He's really cute. But I just didn't have what I needed to keep him and his mother, because I would have had to keep them separate, so.

10:55 Yeah, because you don't want him biting.

10:57 On her and good life.

11:00 Other than, you know, jamming and doing basket making and being mayor, what else do you really enjoy in your job?

11:07 Oh, gosh, I do so many things. We just started a volunteer, well, in September, started a volunteer lunch program for the kids in port Republic school because we don't have much money. And so I'm in charge of that, of getting volunteers. We have eleven volunteers that on a daily basis rotate and feed the kids breakfast and lunch every day. Then I also started something, started the Port Republic Education foundation. And we do have a program within that called the prep program, Port republic enrichment program. And we do after school classes. I was teaching a class called project 1637, the history of Port republic and colonial crafts. So I was teaching that. But we also offered French, we offered music, we offered all the things that the kids don't really have because we are such a small school. It's just k to 8110 kids, that's all. So. But a culture is made up of music and art and all those things. And who's going to support the museums and go to concerts if they don't, aren't even aware that there's an underlying culture here that we can keep going. And we're always, like they say, one generation away from losing making jam or losing spinning wool, any of those things. If people don't show people, of course we have the videos and things and we have YouTube, but without that, who knows? Maybe we would lose that. But people have to be able to have these hands on experiences, and then it's good for muscle memory, you know, if they do it with their hands rather than watch it, it really helps them to learn it better. So you probably thought I just lay around and do nothing in between doing all this, but I don't. I'm not that kind of person. In fact, if I didn't have to sleep, I wouldn't. I can't sit still and read a book. But like, normally, if this dog wasn't in my lap, I'd be knitting and talking to you because I can't just. It's difficult to sit for me. So there's always lots to do. And then in the summer, there's the farm. I have a garden and taking care of the animals twice a day. I'm never bored. Never in my life have I been bored. There's always too much to do and my brain is like fireworks. I'm always coming up with ideas, oh, I want to try this, I want to do that. Or I'll watch something on YouTube that inspires me to learn something new. So I'm always looking for new inspiration, new things to do.

13:20 What's your next new project? Is there another new project you're thinking of doing?

13:25 Well, this parade is all consuming right now for me because I also want to do, in the midst of this, a bike parade. I want to do a poster contest, do a souvenir booklet. It's not just a parade, you know, it's celebrating the 375th year. So that's really what I'm. Plus, I'm still running this business, Swan Bay folk Art Center a couple times. Well, I usually teach maybe four times a week here, and then I go to Tuckerton and seaport and teach there. And one Saturday a month, I teach for Stockton. It's called SCOSA. Stockton center on successful aging. I teach for their program as well.

13:59 There's a lot you also mentioned about generations, and you don't want, you know, different generations losing this art. You told me that your grandchildren are, what, fifth generation jammers?

14:09 Yeah.

14:11 Do your kids also do jamming and making?

14:15 They had a unique experience growing up because in 1988, and I'll go back to the history why this all happened, but in 1988, we opened up Swan Bay folk art center, and my kids were very little, but once they turned ten, they would come and help teach classes, and we taught some classes around the american girl dolls. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but, yeah, they had their dolls that have books written about them, historical books. So you can teach about history and what girls life was like back then, and what we would do. 16 kids would sign up for a class. It's usually we had to add new classes because it was very popular when we did it. And each one of my daughters would teach a station. So 16 kids, four per station, and for 4 hours, they would move around the room from station to station doing. Oh, we would do colonial tea parties. We did victorian ice cream social. We did a swedish picnic, like mexican crafts. We did. And so after 4 hours, they would have a lot of things to bring home with them that they made and learn a lot about that culture. So my children and I would sit down and we brainstorm, like, oh, felicity probably made apple butter. Let's teach the kids how to make apple butter, or we need to make an apron for our tea party, or a mop cap or learn to write with a quill pen. So the kids would go from station to station doing these things. And it was so fun for me because I watched my kids come up with ideas and come up with sometimes with better ways of teaching things than I had. So in all way, shape, or form, they're all teachers, and they're all not vocationally, but they all do something where they teach something, and they learned all these crafts, like, every single one. They had to know how to do it because they were helping teach it. And that's the best way to learn something is to teach it, because you'll come up with kids that can't sew a straight line. So my daughter would say, well, let's put dots here. So they have to go up one dot, down the other dot to sew. They would come up with things like that. So it was really, really so much fun for all of us. Yes, they worked. They had to walk down four steps to come to work because my classroom is attached to the house. But sometimes they were still late, even though they had to walk down four steps. I don't understand. But they were. And so they learned so much during all this, and they just continued on, you know, doing a lot of these same things. Two of them are spinners. One is a portrait painter. And then when she was a little girl, she asked me if I was an ultra manure, and I said, do you mean entrepreneur? She knows ultra manure. I said, yeah, I'm an ultra manure. But now she's the ultra manure of the family. She makes wool felted ball garlands that started out with our sheep. And now she's grown to such a place where she has hired 300 women from Nepal through fair trade. And she. It's huge. She has seven full time employees, plus the 300 that are working in Napal. Fair trade. So there's 300 women that have jobs that normally wouldn't have jobs. And it's. It's been amazing watching her, because she's not only a good artist, but she's also a good marketer. It's hard to be good at both.

17:24 So you have four daughters, you said three daughters. Three daughters allowed. All of them are very successful. And then your grandchildren are learning how to do basket and jamming stuff like, we'll do.

17:35 Let's have a colonial day. So the kids would come over, we went out, we picked strawberries, and then we made jam, and then we made pot roast in a dutch oven. And that's how they would have done it. We basket that day, and, like, we have special days like that. So.

17:48 So tell me a little bit about your childhood and how you grew up.

17:51 Yeah, inspiration came from many places. My dad was a college professor. He went to Princeton, and then he taught at Princeton and at Harvard and Northwestern and then Rutgers. And then. Yeah, he's the Ivy League guy. He was a poor guy from Iowa who decided he read a book on a description of Princeton University and decided he wanted to go there as a kid, lied about how much money he had. He had a single mom, got on a bus brought his books in one suitcase, his clothes in the other, and showed up at Princeton and had to leave for a year, two years for the GI. He went into the korean war and got all what he needed to get his doctorate, like, worked through with his doctorate with the GI bill. So we were living in Princeton. I grew up in Princeton, which is culturally huge. You know, there's theater and there's music and there's everything that. The schools were fabulous. I sang in a choir. Like, we. We had so many opportunities there. And I ended up going to Stockton because I wanted to be an animal behaviorist. Because I worked for an animal behaviorist at Princeton. I had to raise slugs, you know, slugs like a snail. So my job as a high school student was to make these slugs thrive. I had to come up with a diet that was best for them. I'd weigh and measure them to see if. Who was growing better, depending on what their diet had. And I thought, well, I could do this. I want to be an animal behaviorist. So I went to Stockton, which in the seventies was very much about. I don't want to call it a hippie school, but, you know, peace, love. Yeah, peace, love, everybody. We sat on carpeted cubicles. Yep. We called the professors by their first name. Everything was very relaxed. So went to Stockton. I flunked calculus. This is not a math brain in here. And I thought they said, well, now you have to take physics and chemistry. I'm like, no, no, no. I don't want to do science and math. I want to do animal behavior. And they said, well, that is science and math. So I left school for a year and thought, what am I going to do now? So I moved back home. I got a job working in a gourmet food store where I cut cheese and I made quiche that got interviewed in the New York Times. They taught me how to do that. And so I learned all about cooking and pairing and what, all this international. It was an international store where I worked. So it was great, but I had to do something creative. So I went to Batstow, and at the time, there was a weaver and spinner there. And I said to her, will you teach me how to weave and spin? She goes, I will give you one class. If I like you, I'll keep teaching you. If I don't like you, I don't want to teach you. I said, well, fair enough. I don't. I don't. I don't blame you for not wanting to hang out with somebody you don't like, so she. I said, how much will it be? She said, $5 a class. I said, and supplies? She goes, that's included now. In the seventies, that was even still a good deal. Okay? And she said, come at 08:00 in the morning and stay till eight at night, one day a week. Twelve hour apprenticeship, basically. So I learned how to spin, how to weave, how to do guatemalan back strap weaving, how to spin wool, how to dye it, the science behind the dyeing of it, and the plants that were needed to make certain colors. And every time you add some additive, it's called a mordanthe, which can be like vinegar or cooking it in an iron pot, there's a chemical reaction that happens. It's different. So I learned all about that, and then I thought, you know, I could go back to school. I think I'm going to. And in Stockton, you could make your own major back then. So I changed my major to early american crafts and culture, which was a combination of business history and art. So I had a senior project in history, which was the colonial textile industry, which is hugely interesting. Maybe I'll come back to that. We'll see how the time goes. But that I did an art project. I had to do an art show. So I did weavings and spinnings and different dyes and made art, and then I studied business. I don't know why I was doing any of this. And my dad said, I don't care what you. What your degree is in, just please finish college. I don't care. You know? And his thing was, he was a 17th century german literature professor, graduate level. That's what he did. That's why I make baskets for a living. But anyway, so I changed my major, and at the time, Smithville was an old village like Williamsburg, and they needed crafters to live in their work, in their houses. So I went, I'm a weaver, a spinner, a doll maker. I could do any of those things. And I went there, and they gave me this giant barn loom. Giant, giant barn loom that I was working on. I could weave blankets on it or anything and talk to the people all dressed in costume. And every day you went there and you pretended you were living in the 1820s. It was so fun. Well, the woodcarver took a liking to me, and he would come into work early and he would sabotage my loom. He would pull a wedge out so it would rack, and if it racks, you can't make a good piece of cloth. So I'd have to call Mister Gary, could you please come and see if you can fix this loom. I can't weave on it. Sure, Miss Niki No problem. He'd carve a wedge. He'd stick it where it needs to be. And I thought he was a genius. I didn't know that he was sabotaging it so he could come and spend time with me. To make a long story short, he courted me in costume. He'd bring me chocolate eclairs. He'd bring me flowers for my house. It was a very romantic way to be courted. So we ended up, after about two and a half years, we got married. We had three children. And I wasn't as creative as I wanted to be because I couldn't weave on my loom, because I wove overshot patterns, which are very complicated mathematical things, which is weird math. I know. It just came back. I could weave, but I couldn't do math. So I saw a tv show called the Woodwright shop where the guy cut down a tree and he made a basket. And I thought, it's just weaving. I could do that. So I started weaving baskets. And then I was asked to teach continuing education classes in a few different places. And I was teaching there, and then I. Then in 1986, we had a house fire. I was at my favorite aunt's funeral, and the whole house pretty much burnt out. When I came back, we didn't really have a place to live. So the whole community. This is what a wonderful community we have got together, gave us a shower, gave us everything we needed to get started again. And I said to my husband, we have to do something to give back, because we had nothing. Like, I had a coat. That's it. We didn't have toys or things for the kids. We didn't have anything. We lost everything. And when the community got together, somebody bought me an electric can opener. I moved up in the world because before that, I had the twisty kind, you know, and I thought, people have improved. I said, we have to do something. It took five months to settle with the insurance company, which was really from God, I can tell you that. Because if we had just fixed the house back the way it was, it was a depression bungalow, which was a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath. It was a tiny little house that five of us were living it. Well, six, because my stepson was living with us then, too. Six of us in this tiny house. But because we had five months to think about it and think of a way that we could give back, we decided to build a classroom onto our house because he's a decoy carver. I was a weaver and spinner and a basket weaver, and we could teach people the things that we do, where they would learn how to make their own pieces of history and keep their legacy alive. Because I always tell people, when you make a basket, you put your name and the date on the bottom because you've now made a piece of history that nobody's going to take apart. They undo laundry, they undo dishes, they undo cleaning your house, but they're not going to undo something that you made. So that was in 1988. We finally opened. It took three years to rebuild our house. Three years long years. Because my husband kept firing everybody. He kept saying, you know, you don't do as good a job as I could do, and I'm paying you more than I make. It was all part of the plan, because the way we built the house is we kicked two by fours on the ground and say, yeah, put a wall up here, put a roof here. Yeah, let's put a window here. And then after it was all built, then we did our as built drawing. They let us do that. Now. They wouldn't let you do that. And so we got to really visualize what we were going to have. And I've been teaching now since 1988 in here. And then, like I say, I go to Tuckerton and for Stockton as well. And also through people coming and meeting each other, like, there are people that will leave basket class that met here, that will go out to lunch afterwards. They make friends, you know, like, yeah. And we had one man who was coming with his wife, and they came once a month with the Scoza program, and he's, the wife said, I won't be here next month because I have to get surgery, but the following month, I'll be back. Well, her surgery went bad, and she never. She passed away. So this man asked, can I still come to basket class? I said, of course you can. And it's been such a healing thing for him because we all knew her, because we all come to the same class every Saturday, once a month, and he could talk about her and reminisce about her, and we all knew her, so we could be real sympathetic as to what was going on. And he came last year and made 45 baskets over the course of a year to give to the people who helped when his wife was sick. And it just makes me feel like there's so much bigger purpose here than just making a basket. It's so much more than that.

27:14 Creating stories, creating memories. So that actually brings me to my last question of the day. For generations listening to this years from now, is there any wisdom you like to pass on to them? What would you like them to know?

27:32 First of all, God has a plan for their life. And follow your passion. If you're passionate about something and you can't figure out how in the world you're ever going to make a living at it, there might be a way. So whatever you're very passionate about, that's been planted, implanted in your wiring. So take it seriously and figure out a way to make it work. And it may just be a hobby, but use it to inspire other people and to bless other people and help them to be the best models of themselves. And you've been given those gifts for a purpose. So take what you're passionate about and it could be anything. It could be you like to interview people. It could be that. It doesn't mean that you have to make something with your hands. You might be really good at writing and you, you need to write something that's going to inspire somebody else. But we're all here, I think, to inspire each other with the gifts that we've been given. So that's my wisdom.

28:29 Thank you so much, Niki I really appreciate everything that you told me today. I learned so much about.