She was born July 6, 1899. Today she would have been 125 years old; as it was, she outlived my grandfather by 24 years and was just shy of her 100th birthday by two months when she died in May 1999.

Ira Hargrave was a fruit farmer in San Gorgonio Township, Riverside County, California according to the 1900 Census record. He died Christmas Eve in 1903. The 1910 US Census lists my grandmother then ten years old and her brothers Jay and Ira, eight and six years old. Her mother Betsy Alavander “Alla” Blackburn is listed as head of household in 1910, a fruit farmer. Later years her occupation would be rancher. Youngest brother Ira was born January 13, 1904, three weeks after his father had died (24 Dec, 1903).

San Gorgonio township in Southern California which included Banning had a population of 356 in 1900. By 1920 the population had risen to 2,507 (US Census documents). It’s hard to picture how a young woman from such a small agricultural community was able to attend the University of Southern California in that time period: our preconceptions of the era might have us believe that “a woman’s place was in the home.” Never-the-less, Emma May Hargrave managed to graduate high school and was awarded a degree from USC School of Pharmacy in 1924.

1917 was a small graduating class in Banning Union High School. In the photo above, Emma May stands in the backrow, one of six women in a class of nine. (photos from Calisphere). Three years later, in 1920, Emma was working as a clerk in a drugstore. My grandfather Ralph Allan Hilbig is listed in the 1923 Redlands City Directory; Ralph was working at DH Frazer Pharmacy at that time, some 20 miles northeast of Banning. This might have been where he met Emma after his first wife passed away in 1922.

Emma May (Hargrave) Hilbig graduated with a degree of Graduate in Pharmacy from USC in 1924, married my grandfather that same year and became stepmother to his two children from an earlier marriage. Two years later my father Floyd Allan was born, and then the twins. By 1933 the San Bernardino, California City Directory has them listed along with their son Ralph with Hilbig’s Pharmacy which would service the surrounding area for many years. Emma Hargrave Hilbig grew up as a daughter of a single mother. They were pioneers, I tell you.