Sarah Hudson-Pierce - Early Years, Family Lineage, Tragedy, and Education

Early Years, Family Lineage, Tragedy, and Education

She was born to Roy Earnest Hudson (1895–1958) and the former Marcella May Morris (1906–1986) near Sulphur Springs, a small community in Benton County in far northwestern Arkansas near the Missouri border. Her girlhood home, still in existence, was a house constructed in the 1840s.

Sarah's mother, Marcella, was born in an underground American Indian sod dwelling near tiny Fairvalley in Woods County in north central Oklahoma. Marcella's grandparents, William Henry Morris (1833-1901) and the former Mary J. Barter (born 1838), had been among the pioneers who staked out 160 acres (0.65 km2) in the Oklahoma Land Rush. W. H. Morris was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Prior to the American Civil War, he came to Linn County Iowa, where in 1855, he married the 16-year-old Mary Barter. He then attended medical school in Keokuk, Iowa, having completed his instruction in 1864. The couple later moved to Oklahoma; three years after his death, Mary B. Morris was still living in Alva in Woods County.

Hudson-Pierce traces her ancestry in the future United States to Lewis Morris (1671-1746), the British governor of New Jersey from 1738 until his death. Previously Lewis Morris had been royal governor of the New York colony, which included New Jersey prior to the separation in 1738. This Lewis Morris' grandson, also Lewis Morris (1719-1798), was a landowner and developer who in 1776 signed the Declaration of Independence as a representative at the Second Continental Congress from New York. Lewis Morris was a half-brother of Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), the New York City native who was editor-in-chief of the United States Constitution and author of its preamble.

Before her third birthday, Marcella Morris was playing on the soft dirt roof of her dwelling. She slipped, fell through the roof, sustained brain damage, and lapsed into a coma. Marcella's mother, meanwhile, was dying of typhoid fever when this accident occurred. Marcella's six-year-old brother, Jimmy, had died of the fever some six weeks earlier. Marcella's father left his two daughters in the care of a kindly neighbor, Clara Knox, who became Marcella's foster mother. In 1914, Marcella's father remarried, and Marcella, at the age of eight, left the security of life with Clara. Marcella did not marry until she was in her late thirties and then only after her father, Sarah's grandfather, had died. Having lived into her nineties, Clara thereafter told Sarah of the tragic circumstances of Marcella's life.

Roy Hudson died, and Sarah lived with Marcella for four years. Marcella subsisted by taking odd jobs but became unable to care for Sarah. Hence, at the age of fourteen, Sarah began living in the foster home of the late Cullen and Martha Adair of Grove in Delaware County in northeastern Oklahoma. Sarah was later placed in an orphanage, the Turley Children's Home, now known as Hope Harbor, in Claremore near Tulsa. She resided at Turley from 1962–1966.

Hudson-Pierce graduated in 1966 from McLain High School in Tulsa. Marcella lived for another three decades, having died in the nursing home in Grove. While she was in the eleventh grade at McLain, Sarah turned to creative writing and public speaking. From 1966-1967, she attended the conservative Church of Christ-affiliated Harding University (then College) in Searcy in White County north of Little Rock.