This week’s item features the Garden Club of East Hampton’s program from its first season, 1915. It lists the club’s officers and their planned events.
The club was founded on Aug. 25, 1914, by a group of local women with a passion for gardening and educating others on its benefits. By June of 1915, the club had accepted an invitation to become an official member of the Garden Club of America.
The back of the program identifies the officers in 1915 as Mary L. Kennedy Woodhouse, president, Elizabeth G. Lockwood, vice president, Harriet Hollister, secretary, and Margaret Potter, treasurer. The first meeting was held on June 8 at the Woodhouse residence, where Maurice Field gave a lecture on perennials.
Two weeks later, the group met to discuss roses at Blanche Benjamin McAlpin’s house. On July 13, the club met again to hear Lillian C. Alderson, a garden designer and lecturer recommended by the Garden Club of America, read her paper on “Color Schemes in the Herbaceous Border and Flowering Shrubs.” Prizes were given out for the best sweet peas.
One of the events listed in the program is the club’s first flower show, planned for July 23 but for unknown reasons moved to Aug. 13, when The East Hampton Star reported the cancellation of the club’s show at the East Hampton Library because of the damage recent storms had done to the flowers.
As a result, the Garden Club’s 1916 flower show at the East Hampton Village residence of the suffragist May Groot Manson is considered the club’s first such show.
In July of 2022, the library will once again host the club’s flower show.
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Mayra Scanlon is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
