If Baptists had bishops (and they don’t), the bishop of the Blackwater Baptist Association was Ira D. “Tuck” Hudgins. He filled the role of elder statesman, counselor and pulpit supply until his death on April 28 at age 91.
Fred Anderson
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“Tuck” Hudgins came into the Blackwater in 1951 when at age 33 he became pastor of the Franklin Baptist Church. By happenstance, he had stopped by the church a few years earlier, in ’47, when he was holding a revival in the area. Little did he know he would return and spend nearly 60 years with the Blackwater Baptists.
Franklin was (and remains) a quiet, small town pleasantly positioned along a busy east-west highway in the midst of swamps and vast stretches of forests and farmlands. It is best known for the mill. On the surface it seemed an unlikely match for a young man who was born in Washington, D.C., engaged in graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and possessed a Type-A personality. But the Baptist church in town longed for better things and had the congregational culture and where-with-all to get what it wanted. The young preacher found a place worth putting down roots.
Ira Durwood Hudgins was one of seven children of Robert and Fanny Hudgins. He and a brother got nicknamed “Nip” and “Tuck” and it stuck. He earned his undergraduate degree at “the Baptist school,” the University of Richmond, and forever after he was a loyal Spider. He took the bold route by receiving his theological education “up North” at Crozer and forever after he was a champion of the school and served a long tenure as chair of its board of trustees.
While a student at Richmond, he served student pastorates. In 1944 he became a U.S. Army chaplain and served in the Philippines and Occupied Japan. From 1946-48, he was pastor of Leesburg Baptist Church; and while there, he was smitten by a young woman, Janet Carter, who simply was scrubbing the floor of a Sunday school classroom when he first spied her. He was taken with her beauty, charm and wit. The couple was wed in June 1948.
He was serving as pastor of a church in Pennsylvania and pursuing graduate studies in history when the opportunity came in Franklin. When they came, the Hudgins family included a son, Carter, and three months after arrival, a second son, Stephen, joined the household. Two others, David and Jonathan, came along; and the four Hudgins boys became famously known for mischief. Carter reckons that the trials of rearing four sons “made leading the Franklin congregation seem like a walk in the park.”
Ira D. “Tuck” Hudgins
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The Franklin pastorate was busy from the beginning. First, there was the completion of a sanctuary remodeling and the rejoicing by all to have it air-conditioned. The religious education program was enhanced. The Boy Scouts became a favored program of the pastor. An ambitious new building program to provide a larger sanctuary, fellowship hall and classrooms was launched and required fundraising. In February 1961 the new plant was dedicated.
With the building program behind him, the pastor turned to social ministries. He became an advocate of support groups for alcoholics. He encouraged the beginning of fellowship clubs for young married couples as well as older couples. He developed speakers’ forums and invited some of the top thinkers among Baptists. He kept revivals on the church calendar and invited some of the best preachers of the times.
He was a denominationalist. As a young buck, he served on the Virginia Baptist General (now Mission) Board and he argued with a system which favored pastoral callings for Southern Baptist Theological Seminary men over men from Northern schools. He encouraged change in the Virginia Baptist leadership. Across the years, nearly every Baptist entity benefited from his trusteeship: the Religious Herald, the Historical Society, UR, the Children’s Home, the SBC Annuity Board. He was among those who saw the coming rift in the SBC at least 30 years before the quake took place.
After 32 years as pastor, Tuck Hudgins retired in 1984; but as a good bishop, he did not leave the area which he and Janet had come to love. By then, they occupied a lovely home of their own with space for his annual forays into vegetable gardening.
There were plenty of opportunities to keep the bishop busy and out of the way of his successors. He served numerous interim pastorates in the Blackwater. He championed Crozer and Colgate-Rochester to the north and Chowan College to the south. He enjoyed study trips at Princeton, St. Andrews in Scotland and Regent’s Park in Oxford, England. He served church mission tours in Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic. He labored to produce a book-length history of the Franklin Church. Everything he undertook, he did with his characteristic gusto.
When Tuck Hudgins entered a room, either the business began or the fun took over. He was the life of a party and his greetings at the front door could be heard clear to the rear. He loved a good joke and a funny story. Son Carter describes his humming of tunes as “the soundtrack of his life.”
As the years accumulated, Hudgins “refused to act as old as he felt.” Carter says that he “drove golf balls further and longer and straighter than any of his sons even after he could not see.” He kept chugging to the various Baptist meetings; and at the BGAV annual gathering of 2007, he managed to get through the long corridors via a wheelchair. He missed the Blackwater spring meeting in early April but only because he was on oxygen.
He was said to have earned more speeding tickets along High Street in Franklin than anyone else. According to son David, when the Hudgins boys got into trouble, “The Preacher,” as they called him, “would adopt a solemn tone but probably was secretly thinking that he would have done the same thing himself.”
“We never felt preached at and looked down upon,” said David. “There was no feeling that he had moral superiority. His same capacity for understanding, empathy and forgiveness was not just for us boys. He was never judgmental when discussing members of the community. He was a truly humble man. He sensed that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God and we were taught that lesson by his example. He could find common ground with anyone.”
The bishop of the Blackwater truly loved the people and they loved him right back.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.