However, the majority of merchants and businesses of Kirksville, the county's major trading hub, instead chose to use La Plata, on the Macon-Adair County border, as their major shipping and passenger service outlet on the Santa Fe. A US Post Office was established in 1887, and several businesses could be found including a barber shop, several general merchants, and two blacksmiths. The Gibbs business district also had of two hotels, an opera house, a bank, lumberyard, undertaker service, a cement factory, and the aforementioned grain elevator. The Bank Of Gibbs was founded in 1898 and served the citizens of Gibbs, Adair County, and northern Macon county well. It closed in 1933. For a time at the turn-of-the-century Gibbs had its own newspaper, "Gibbs Telegraph". Gibbs featured four churches, but a falling population led to the closing of the last one in the early 1980s. The last Gibbs business, a grocery store, closed in 1970. It was also in that year that a rural health clinic, established by a Kirksville hospital in 1949, closed. The Santa Fe rail depot was closed in the 1960s and the two-room school was consolidated into the Brashear (Adair County R-2) school system in 1966.