“Miss Hubbard,” the teacher: Agnes Hubbard Allen, born in 1896

THE TEACHER

Agnes Hubbard Allen

Born in 1896

She encouraged him to go out, but he had something else on his young mind. He laid a piece of paper on her desk, and before she knew what was happening, he reached up and kissed her on the

In 1919, when black stockings with high-top button shoes were in style, a young woman was approached about taking a job teaching school on isolated Hilton Head Island.

   Agnes Lucille Hubbard hesitated. At the age of twenty-two, she enjoyed playing the piano, keeping accounts as a bookkeeper and dressing up. She had grown up in a cozy, churchgoing family of eight children at Pepper Hall Plantation near Bluffton. She was living with a sister in Beaufort, working in an office. She had not studied to become a teacher. She had no notion of building a career. Rather, she intended to become somebody’s wife one day.

   Hilton Head was an island in every sense of the word then, connected to the mainland only by sailboats, bateaux and steamers. Blufftonians, Savannahians and Beaufortonians rarely if ever had a reason to go there. Beaufort County’s whole population was only about 22,269. Blacks outnumbered whites ten to one countywide, even more so on the Sea Islands. Racial tensions were generally kept at bay, but the races did not mix socially. To Agnes, Hilton Head must have seemed like a remote wilderness, largely unknown but probably rough, likely boring and almost certainly devoid of a society that would welcome her. The prospect of finding a husband there was not good.

   W.P. Clyde, a wealthy Northerner, owned Honey Horn Plantation on Hilton Head at the time, using it for hunting during the winter. A handful of white families lived on the place to take care of the house, the fences, the dogs and the horses as well as to make life luxurious for the guests who came to shoot. Horseback riding, dog training and quail shooting were the skills most admired. Would Agnes Lucille Hubbard, a young girl who had grown up in the Okatie, fit into that world?

   After a lot of thought and a little bit of prayer, Agnes decided to take the job of teaching forty-two white children in a one-room school on Honey Horn Plantation. For such a dainty young woman, disciplining and educating youngsters who lived in the rhythms of the tide and went barefoot most of the time could be interesting even though it might not be easy. “Miss Hubbard” stayed through two school terms, 1919–1920 and 1920–1921.

GLAMOUR AS WELL AS LESSONS

Although Agnes Hubbard’s task was to teach reading, writing and ’rithmetic to the children, to her surprise, she also enjoyed the outdoor life so prized by her school’s families. Proudly and sentimentally, in 1982, when I interviewed her, she pulled black-and-white photos out of an album, one showing her riding a horse through the fields with the hunters; another of her standing on the beach in a long, dark suit and high-heel shoes, her hair knotted in a bun over her ears, her hands folded demurely in front of her, a smile on her face. She looked as if she knew she was pretty.

   On wages of $70 a month, Agnes had spent $60 in a single shopping spree in Savannah, Georgia. Traveling there by steamer, she bought a handsome suit with lace on the collar and a white-brimmed, plumed hat and, looking in the mirror, decided that she “looked nice in that outfit.” So she hired a photographer. Decades later, among her children and grandchildren, that picture was a favorite heirloom.

   At least one of Agnes’s students also thought she “looked nice.” At recess one day, one young boy refused to go outside with the other children. First, he hung around his desk, then around hers. She encouraged him to go out, but he had something else on his young mind. He laid a piece of paper on her desk, and before she knew what was happening, he reached up and kissed her on the cheek.

   In her sternest teacher’s voice, she scolded the boy, told him to scram and direct his kisses elsewhere in the future. Sixty years later, she remembered the incident with a laugh. “‘A fresh little thing,’ I thought. The nerve of him,” she said.

EIGHT CHILDREN ON A FARM

Born in 1896 at Pepper Hall, Graves family property (her mother was a Graves), Agnes grew up on the site, her father farmed and raised almost everything the family needed. They would go to stores in Bluffton for supplies such as rice, shoes, fertilizer and bolts of cloth, charging everything until the cotton crop came in the late summer.

   “My father would get paid for the cotton, and he’d go down once a year to pay the bill at [Mr. Alfred] Fripp’s general store. That was how we did it.”

   The horse and buggy took the family to Bluffton at other times for dental appointments with “Dr. Guerard.” He had a tooth drill, mechanized by a foot pump. In 1982, Agnes demonstrated how Dr. Guerard pumped the gadget to turn the bit and drill the teeth to fill the cavities. He had no numbing medication, no squirt of water to diminish the pain. With delight, nevertheless, at the age of eighty-six, Agnes opened her mouth wide. “Dr. Guerard must have known something about dentistry. I still have all my original teeth,” she said.

   To keep the yard at Pepper Hall Plantation from looking messy with leaves and acorns, the eight children in the Hubbard family had to sweep it regularly. Out back, the Okatie River was there for swimming at high tide in summer and crabbing at low tide in the fall. The children had daily chores: helping to tend the buggy horses, the mules, the cows, the hogs and the chickens. A naturally bubbling well on the place was used not only for drinking water but also for keeping the milk cool. “Mama would set the pan of milk down in it—it flowed down to the bluff—in the evening, and the cream would rise to the top of it by morning. That’s how we did that,” she said of early twentieth-century refrigeration in the Lowcountry. And the children participated in the hauling of water and milk.

METHODIST AND

The Hubbard family may or may not have known the word “ecumenical” when Agnes was a girl, but they worshiped in an ecumenical spirit nevertheless. At St. Luke’s Methodist Church, a few miles west of the Hubbards’ home, the Methodists held services on second and fourth Sundays. At Indian Hill Baptist Church, to the east a few miles, the Baptists held services on first and third Sundays.

   “We’d get in the buggy every Sunday to go to church,” Agnes said. “I wouldn’t know till we got out to the road and saw whether my father went right or left whether we’d go to the Methodist or the Baptist Sunday school that day.”

   Homemade music, on fiddles, banjos and harmonicas, played an important role in the community’s entertainment. Agnes learned to play the piano from a Winthrop College graduate, who taught the Okatie-area farm children in a school near the “head of the road” (the intersection of U.S. Route 278 and S.C. Route 170) and lived with the Hubbards for four years. Agnes recalled half a century afterward that when she played “Black Hawk Waltz” in the family living room, the cotton pickers on Pepper Hall would stand outside the open windows, listening, bobbing their heads and swaying

   For square dances, neighbors would gather in the big house at Rose Hill. “Bub” Walker, the owner, would get what Agnes called a “jackleg” band to play, and the teenagers would do-si-do and swing their partners to local fiddle playing behind the Gothic windows and under the chandeliers.

   Agnes Hubbard’s time teaching school on Hilton Head made happy memories for her. And yet, after two years, she moved back to the mainland. She taught school in Dale, a rural community in northern Beaufort County, for a year before meeting Aquilla “Quill” Jackson Allen of Savannah one day near Pritchardville. Ever conscious of her beauty, she was wearing “a thin, pretty Georgette blouse and a crepe de chine skirt” at the time. She sat down on the buggy seat and crossed her legs, pulling her skirt down. Quill noticed her and promptly announced to others nearby that Agnes would be his wife.

   So, in St. Luke’s Methodist Church, in 1922, where Agnes had sung hymns on second and fourth Sundays as a child, Agnes and Quill were married. After honeymooning in Florida, they spent the next fifty years together in Savannah, where he was in the automotive parts business. At their home on East Fortieth Street, they raised two daughters and two sons. Summers, they took trips in their Buick. In 1934, they drove to the World’s Fair in Chicago; Detroit, Michigan; Canada; New York and Niagara Falls. The girl who grew up sweeping acorns out of the yard at Pepper Hall Plantation felt she had done all right for herself.

   After Quill died in 1972, Agnes moved into an apartment in Savannah. By the 1980s, she was a frequent visitor to Hilton Head Island, by that time home of her daughter, Elaine Kennedy, four granddaughters and two grandsons-in-law. By then, more than sixty years after she had come to teach at Honey Horn, she was one of only a few around who remembered the island’s public education system as a few small wood-frame school buildings, several for blacks and one for whites, each scattered along the sandy roads and consisting of a single classroom with a wood-burning stove.