Alex Floyd, contributor.
As America turns 250 and more attention is called to all levels of our history, it’s easy to focus on the “big people” and the turning point style events. The great inventors, scientists, statesmen and such get the glory when at the local level it’s the small business people that truly are at the heart of who we are. I’ve been working on this story a while and have been saving it for the “intersection” of Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March). This is the story of a black lady named Mary Beal Tanner, a remarkable Pembroke legend for the first 50 plus years of its history.
Mary Beal was born in the Collins area of Tattnall County around 1874. This is the generation of thousands of people in our area who were experiencing freedom and the American dream for the first time. In 1900, Mary Beal shows her first entrepreneurial spirit in the Tattnall census with her occupation as “wash and iron”. In April 1905, she purchased a “town lot” on Strickland Street in Pembroke from Beulah Rimes the widow of Dr. W.B. Rimes a charter member of the Pembroke Christian Church. She ran a barber shop (perhaps the first in Pembroke) where the Tos Theatre stands today. She advertised in the Pembroke Enterprise as “Mary B. Tanner, Barber and Hairdresser, shaving, haircutting, massaging, first class hot and cold baths” in the early 1910’s.
Barbershops in those days were labor-intensive enterprises. Razors and clippers were sharpened by hand on leather straps and hot water for shaving and steamed towels required a hand pump and a wood-burning stove. They were also for the most part exclusively male and segregated by race. Mary Beal lived in a world where she could cut the hair and shave the neck of a white man in her shop but couldn’t sit beside him in the train depot right across the street.
Mysteriously, we don’t know much about the identity of “Tanner”. There are no marriage records in Tattnall or Bryan for Mary and their marriage must’ve been short-lived. She was Mary Beal in the 1920 census, Mary B. Tanner in 1930 and on her headstone, both were used in deeds and mortgages. A husband never appears with her in a census or is mentioned in any other document. In 1909, Mary Beal Tanner and Richard Beal (presumably a brother) purchased a 45 acre farm west of town from E.V. Harvey. A series of security deeds and mortgages (including one to the Statesboro Buggy Company) showed that she owned the farm through the Great Depression and beyond.
In 1913, she sold her Strickland Street lot to Julius Morgan. This began a long relationship with the immigrant from Russia/ Poland who founded the Pembroke National Bank, Department Store and other ventures. In 1917, according to the Pembroke Enterprise Morgan moved the J. B. Carter house (still standing on Church Street) “about 50 yards” along with the “barbershop and two other old wood buildings” to make room for a brick building to sell Maxwell automobiles “adj the building now occupied by J. D. Harn” (the tan painted portion of the old Bryan County Senior Center).
That same year Mr. Morgan sold Mary Beal a 1.5 acre ‘triangular lot where Strickland St meets the Public Rd to Bulloch County’ (where City Hall stands now) but she still appears in the 1920 census at her Strickland Street address. A later Pembroke Enterprise article states that Morgan moved the barbershop from downtown across the railroad tracks to his home lot (where Bedingfields Pharmacy and Mearstech stand today).
In November 1919, Beal wrote a heartfelt letter in the Enterprise to her customers “during the past sixteen years” she says “as I am old and my health has failed me I am forced to give up my work”. She appears next in the 1930 census next door to Julius Morgan with her occupation as ‘house-servant’. It’s possible Mr. Morgan moved her home also when he purchased her lot. Julius Morgan died in 1936 and his large brick home (and possibly the barbershop) burned soon after. The Maxwell garage was replaced by the Tos Theatre and adjacent Drugstore in 1938.
The Enterprise reports that Mary Beal was found dead in her home at age 8590 by her neighbor Dewey Futch in January 1954. Her small home was still lit by kerosene lamps and washed with well-drawn water. She had awakened, built a fire, got dressed, laid back down and went back to sleep. Coroner R.L. Jackson determined natural causes.
She had no family in Pembroke, but her death was mourned by hundreds black and white who had received their first “store-bought” haircut in Pembroke’s first barber chair. She was buried not far from her farm at Beautiful Zion Cemetery where she rests today.
Of all the ‘kitchen-table conversations’ I’d like to hear when I get to heaven one of the top is the Polish-Jewish immigrant banker Julius Morgan and the Tattnall-born African-American barber Mary Beal Tanner. Both faced challenges in 1900’s America but through hard work it made opportunities for both of them. I bet they had some great stories. In a time where our televisions, phones and media are full of news about America’s challenges with immigrants and racial strife, I want us to remember that we can make it all work on the local level, just like they did on these same streets 120 years ago.
Alex Floyd is part of the Bryan County Commissioners, representing District 1.