Maids and Matrons Club

Duane's take

The official marker for the Maids and Matrons Club tells it this way, and I'm just passin' it along. Now, Brownfield, Texas had only been a town for three years when eleven women decided that three years was long enough to wait. The year was 1906, and those eleven women gathered together and formed a club.

They called it the Maids and Matrons Club, and right from the start, you got the sense this wasn't going to be a group that just sat around. By 1907, barely a year in, the club had already become primarily a study group, and the members founded the town's very first library that same year. The first library.

In a town that was still, by most measures, just getting its boots on. Come 1915, the club affiliated with the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, and they kept right on going, operating that library, supporting civic cause after civic cause, year after year. Now here's where the story lands hard.

In 1957, when the Kendrick Memorial County Library was organized, the Maids and Matrons Club didn't hold a fundraiser, didn't loan out a few books, didn't make a token gesture. They donated their entire collection. Three thousand volumes.

Every last one. Gave it all to form the nucleus of the new institution's holdings. Eleven women started something in 1906, and by 1957 it had grown into three thousand reasons why a town remembers who showed up first.

What the marker says

In 1906, three years after the founding of Brownfield, eleven women gathered together to form a club. Named Maids and Matrons, the club became primarily a study group in 1907, and the members founded the town's first library that year. Affiliated with the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs in 1915, the club continued to operate the library and supported numerous civic causes. When the Kendrick Memorial County Library was organized in 1957, the club donated their entire 3,000-volume collection of books to form the nucleus of the institution's holdings.