The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1892 – the club movement organized
In 1892 the women's clubs of Fort Wayne became one body, and the city got its library: in that year all the literary, musical and art clubs of the city — eleven clubs, in the library history's count — were called together and federated as the Woman's Club League of Fort Wayne, with Mrs. Charles Dryer (Alice Peacock Dryer) as founder and first president. The League's stated object, in its articles, was to bring the city's women's clubs into communication so they could prosecute work of common interest; its first work was the largest any of them had attempted. The city had evaded Indiana's 1881 library act for fourteen years. On 25 July 1893 the League petitioned the Common Council, the council levied a tax of one and a half cents that raised $3,261.11, a room was secured in City Hall in June 1894, and the Fort Wayne Public Library opened on 28 January 1895 with 3,606 volumes — 117 of them given by the League itself. The League incorporated on 28 April 1897 and joined both the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the Indiana Union of Literary Clubs the same year (it federated with the Indiana Federation of Women's Clubs in 1907). In 1901 the League went to Andrew Carnegie: as the story was told at the time, Carnegie was prepared to give $250,000 with a requirement that the city spend ten percent yearly on support, and the committee asked him to limit the gift to $75,000; the Carnegie building was dedicated on 7 January 1904. The library's own history is in the Libraries chapter; the institutional point is this branch's: the city's central cultural institution exists because a federation of women's clubs petitioned, taxed and negotiated it into being, a decade before any of its members could vote. The League ran departments and lecture series alongside its civic work — the 1904–05 yearbook lists its departments and its standard, "Progress, Reform and Untiring Effort" — and its members thread the rest of this record: its civic chairman Alice Foster McCulloch leads the suffrage entry below, and its war work appears in the war-work entry.
Sources: Woman's Club League of Fort Wayne, yearbook 1904–05 (Internet Archive) — the 1892 federation, the articles of incorporation of 28 April 1897, the federation dates; the Libraries chapter of this record (Slater-Putt, Beyond Books, 1995 — the July 1893 petition, the levy and the $3,261.11, the opening collection, the 1901 Carnegie approach); the Fort Wayne Woman's Club annual announcement, 1960–61 (the League's federation dates as the club movement printed them).