  The Haldane phase for antiferromagnetic spin-1 chains is a celebrated
topological state of matter, featuring gapped excitations and fractional
spin-1/2 edge states. Here, we provide numerical evidence that this phase can
be realized with a Hubbard model at half filling, where each $s=1$ spin is
stored in a four-site fermionic structure. We find that the noninteracting
limit of our proposed model describes a one-dimensional topological insulator,
and we conjecture it to be adiabatically connected to the Haldane phase. Our
work suggests a route to build spin-1 networks using Hubbard model quantum
simulators.
