Saying goodbye to Hilton Head’s first Black licensed builder | Opinion

“The Wood Doctor” has left the building, a building he helped construct with the discipline of a plumb line and flair of a spiral staircase.

The 82-year life of Alexander “Alec” Brown Sr. tells the story of a crucial era for his race, and his native Hilton Head Island, where his remarkable generation will soon join him in rest beneath our weeping live oaks.

He died Oct. 19 with his son, Town Council member Alex Brown Jr., and brother Marvin holding his hand, praying and listening to gospel music.

He once held the key to Sea Pines. As in, the key, a literal key needed to open a gate when it was like a cattle gate and “The Wood Doctor” had to get in to build homes.

He worked many years for Bobby Woods, one of the first homebuilders as a dusty, quiet island began morphing into a “world-class resort community.”

He earned a reputation for meticulous work, most of it self-taught in the ways of his forebears, dating to the Mitchelville freedmans’ village.

Alex Brown Sr. was a grandson of Prince Albert and Alice Driessen Brown from the island’s era of isolation and bartering economy.

His parents, Robert Prince and Rachel Ferguson Brown raised 10 children in a house with three bedrooms, and one bath.

His father farmed and fished, sailing his goods to market in Savannah, until a bridge was built and he had his own landscaping business.

His parents were a deacon and deaconess at First African Baptist Church, the island’s oldest institution.

Alex Brown Sr. took wood-shop at the M.C. Riley school in Bluffton, his first step to becoming a master carpenter. When he opened his own construction company, he was the island’s first Black licensed builder.

His son Alex, vice president of operations at Camp Hilton Head, reflected on the passing of his father’s generation, saying, “They did a lot of trailblazing for our generation.”

His dad was hauled to a three-room junior high school in Mr. Alexander Patterson’s truck. Alex Jr. said his generation had it much better, and understood there was more to education than high school. His father was known for saying, “Get your lesson.”

And on the day his father died, Alex’s brother Kevin was named Teacher of the Year for the Carroll County (Ga.) School District. He is a high school director of bands, but more.

“Mr. Brown is teaching students respect, responsibility, dedication, commitment and how powerful music can be in our daily lives,” his boss said a school district press release.

The four children of Alec and Rhoda Brown were taught not to be OK, but to be the best humankind ever saw, Marvin Brown said.

Alex Jr. said his father’s generation taught them an entrepreneurial spirit — to catch the tide that was supposed to raise all boats.

Emory Campbell said at his friend’s funeral Oct. 25 at First African Baptist, “The thing that pops out in his story is the word ‘discipline.’ He was a disciplined individual. He kept his eye on the prize.”

Young Alec might have seemed undisciplined as a youth, when he and his sister Lucille were the family’s “party animals,” sneaking out of windows at night to go dancing.

“James Brown didn’t have anything on him,” Marvin Brown said.

People formed a circle just to watch them, and Lucille would start a line.

“I think that’s where the Soul Train line started, right there,” Marvin said of local juke joints like Burke’s Hideaway.

Alec and Lucille were there the night Ike and Tina Turner wowed a crowd in a club near Folly Beach called The Breeze.

But mostly, Alec Brown was a builder.

His hands crafted spiral staircases for corporate America retiring to their Shangri La on his once-remote island. And they crafted the bedroom and bathroom suite added to his own home for his mother’s comfort in her final days.

Alexander Brown Sr. was laid to rest in the Drayton Cemetery, near Mitchelville, where the breezes of Port Royal Sound still stir the weeping oaks.