Abbie Holmes Christensen
Cultivating a New South Through Education
story by CAROL LAUVRAY
Educating African Americans During the Reconstruction Era
When the Civil War began, there was no compulsory public education in South Carolina. Private schools were for whites only and it was against the law to teach a slave to read. The Union’s occupation of Beaufort beginning in November 1861, just seven months after the war started, changed that and turned the Sea Islands into an educational laboratory known as the Port Royal Experiment. Northern missionaries and abolitionists seized the opportunity to prove what they had long proclaimed, if African Americans had the educational advantages enjoyed by white students, black students could achieve equally. The Port Royal Experiment was one of the most important by-products of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. (Beaufort History Museum Exhibit, Reconstruction Beaufort: Islands of Hope in a Sea of Distress, on display at the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park Visitors Center, 713 Craven Street.)
One of those Northern abolitionists was Abbie Mandana Holmes, who arrived in Port Royal, South Carolina with her parents, Reuben and Rebecca Holmes, and her younger sister, Georgina, in November 1864, the year after the Emancipation Proclamation was first read there. Although just 12 years old when her family came from Massachusetts to join the Port Royal Experiment, Abbie understood the significance of the Civil War and Reconstruction and felt that she was a part of that momentous time, according to her biographer Monica Maria Tetzlaff (Cultivating A New South: Abbie Holmes Christensen and the Politics of Race and Gender 1852 – 1938). In the biography, Tetzlaff cited Abbie as writing, “The ending of slavery promised the beginning of a new and brighter day in the south,” and her family wanted “to be a part of it.” Tetzlaff details in her book that when Abbie arrived in Beaufort, she was surrounded by unfamiliar people, Yankee soldiers, and Gullah-speaking African Americans. On Christmas Eve 1864, Abbie witnessed the incredible spectacle of thousands of African American refugees arriving in Beaufort in the wake of Sherman’s March through Georgia.
Abbie’s parents were staunch abolitionists and reformers and believed in education for all. At the age of only 12, Abbie received certification from the National Freedman’s Relief Association to teach freed people in Beaufort. She first taught black children in Sunday school. Then from 1870 to 1872, she taught school classes averaging about 30 African American children. The abolitionist teachers Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, who founded nearby Penn School to teach freed people, were an inspiration and served as examples to Abbie. After visiting Towne and Murray at Penn School, Abbie wrote she was impressed by the “really fine readers” and near perfect order of the school.
Young Abbie became one of the first collectors of African American folklore. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, she wrote a pioneering collection of Gullah stories, which were finally published in 1892. Biographer Tetzlaff states that Abbie Holmes Christensen’s book, Afro-American Folk Lore, is the most important public work for which she is remembered, and attributes the motivation for Abbie’s folklore work to her connections with the Gullah people of the Sea Islands and the abolitionists who were her mentors.
Throughout her life, Abbie maintained close ties with the women in her extended family who were living in the North. During the years from 1866 to 1874, she traveled back and forth between Beaufort and Massachusetts to spend time there with her family and to attend school. In 1867, Abbie attended Ipswich Female Seminary, an educational institution touted as encouraging independence of thinking and Christian character. In late 1872, Abbie began attending Mount Holyoke Seminary, a school for women that not only helped foster a sense of women’s duties and mission, but also of women’s rights to earn a livelihood, to vote, and to be considered the intellectual equals of men, according to Tetzlaff’s biography. While at Mount Holyoke, Abbie’s ambition was to become a doctor and she carried that desire back to Beaufort.
Marriage, Motherhood, and Education
When she returned to Beaufort in March of 1874, Abbie was intent on becoming a homeopathic physician, however, “Niels Christensen’s ardent and purposeful courtship changed Abbie Holmes’ plans,” writes biographer Tetzlaff. A former Union Army Captain who led “Colored Troops” during the Civil War, Niels was posted as a civil servant overseeing the National Cemetery in Beaufort when Abbie and he first met in 1872. On April 13, 1875, the couple married in a simple ceremony in Beaufort’s Charles Street Baptist Church. Niels soon became a hardware store and lumber mill merchant in Beaufort. He was also involved in a real estate business, buying land at low prices at tax sales and selling it mostly in small parcels to African American families, as well as becoming a general contractor. His businesses prospered and by 1881, he was able to buy one of the finest antebellum homes in Beaufort located on the river in “the Point.” By 1887, the couple had had six children, however, one of their boys had tragically died of diphtheria at the age of five.
Although not formally trained as a teacher, Abbie was interested in the theories of early childhood development and began her children’s education when they were young. In 1881, she set up a kindergarten for her two oldest boys. Later Abbie took her children to Brookline, Massachusetts for schooling during the winters. While there she became involved in politics and civic activities as a suffragette and advocate for temperance.
The Shanklin School
After Reconstruction, many African Americans in Beaufort County were able to make a living as independent farmers, until the devastation wreaked by the Great Hurricane of 1893 that washed over the Sea Islands killing thousands and decimating the area’s crops and industry. Abbie Christensen’s response to the hurricane in 1893 marked her transition from an abolitionist daughter interested in black culture to a reform leader intent on improving conditions for Sea Island African Americans, states biographer Tetzlaff. In Boston at the time of the hurricane, Abbie appealed to churches there, organized collections, and sent materials and supplies to the Sea Islands. Her efforts helped draw national attention to the disaster, which led to the Red Cross’ Clara Barton coming to Beaufort and working with Abbie’s husband Niels in aiding survivors.
In the years following the 1893 hurricane, Abbie looked for ways to assist poor African Americans in Beaufort and focused her efforts on improving the woefully inadequate education of the rural African American children. Anne Christensen Pollitzer, Abbie’s great-granddaughter and a fifth-generation Beaufortonian, has researched and written about the Christensen family, and in particular about Abbie Holmes Christensen. In 2014, Anne Pollitzer wrote an article detailing the development and history of the Port Royal Agricultural and Industrial School: the years planning and building the school (1894 – 1901); the years of its operation (1902 – 1920); and its evolution into the Beaufort County Training School (1920 – 1957), and about Abbie’s vision for the school and her involvement in making it a reality.
“The Port Royal Agricultural School…was the culmination of many years of planning, recruiting, studying, researching, and above all, fundraising and construction. It is the story of several important families, including the Christensens, Shanklins, Bythewoods, Washingtons, McLeods, Donaldsons, Cummings, Thomas Lee, and others,” Anne Pollitzer writes in the article.
In 1894 while in Massachusetts, Abbie met Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute. Afterward, she continued to study the issue of education for black people, collecting information about the various plans in use. In 1897, Paul Watson, an African American minister in Beaufort, wrote a letter to Abbie posing the hopeful idea, “…Would to God that some of our Northern friends would interest themselves in the purchase of this place, a tract of land in rural Burton, for the industrial education of our young people.”
Industrial and agricultural education was the most popular approach to the training of black children at the time, with the objective of agricultural self-sufficiency through land ownership. In addition, the Port Royal Agricultural School instructed girls in cooking, sewing and general housekeeping, and students received schoolroom instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and farming. The school became known as the Shanklin School due to the influence of Joseph Shanklin, revered teacher and principal of the school, and his wife India Shanklin.
A Legacy of Education and Civic Involvement
Abbie established a Montessori school in 1917 for her grandchildren and neighborhood preschoolers. In April 2019, Carroll Christensen Sommerville Eve, the 95-year-old granddaughter of Abbie Holmes Christensen, shared her own childhood memories of Abbie: “I remember her as a teacher at the little Montessori kindergarten. We would line up and one of us would be chosen to carry the flag. We would march in and around singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee…Abbie would try to do things with us grandchildren that we would enjoy, but they were always instructive…She felt that parents and grandparents should be there to guide us into the good things of life and proper ways of living.”
Abbie died in October 1938, leaving behind her five children, their families, and many followers. The daughter of abolitionists and teachers, Abbie Holmes Christensen’s legacy is that of championing education for all people, civic involvement, and social reform. Her influence continues to be felt in Beaufort County generations later, as her descendants follow her example. Two of them are Abbie’s great-granddaughter Anne Christensen Pollitzer, who founded the E.C. Montessori and Grade School in Beaufort, and her great-grandson, Paul Sommerville, who serves as a member of Beaufort County Council.
