Longwood Magazine Online


At The HUB of it All.
When Lynne Hubbard Rabil, '75, took over the HUBS' peanut delivery shortly after she learned to drive, she already knew the route.
   She'd first made the trip as a toddler ­ she and her twin sisters and brother ­ as their Mom loaded the tykes in her car filled with packages of peanuts and drove around Southside Virginia delivering her home-cooked peanuts.
  From a start of cooking 25 pounds of peanuts a week in 1954 in her Southampton County kitchen, Dot Hubbard's 45-year old company now processes one million pounds of HUBS peanuts a year.
  Gross sales of HUBS peanuts are in the millions of dollars and HUBS peanuts are shipped all over the world. Years ago, when the company got a FAX machine, the first order came from Hong Kong. Later, when the company went online, the first email order came from Japan.
  Could this be the same Dorothy Owen Hubbard, Longwood College (Farmville State Teachers College) Class of Œ47, physical education/science major, Roanoke City schools teacher, native of Southampton County?
  Indeed it is. "A woman before her time," is the admiring description Lynne Rabil gives of her mother who was the first in the U.S. to cook and ship commercially the extra-large, water-blanched peanuts.

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