Information Sheet

 

 

R         Potosi Civic League (Potosi, Mo.).

187                  Records, 1921-1961.

                                    Eight volumes and three folders.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

 

These are minutes of meetings, financial and membership records, miscellaneous pa­pers, and yearbooks of a woman’s club in Potosi, Washington County, Missouri.  The records in­clude a set of yearbooks from a similar organization, the Potosi Woman’s Study Club, 1927-1943.

 

Organized in 1921, the Potosi Civic League was chartered to promote education, law en­forcement, child welfare, and the general well-being of the community.  Membership was limited to residents of the Potosi school district, which included the area around Old Mines and Cadet.  Rebecca White was elected president of the club at its first meeting, serving con­tinuously in that capacity for the entire period for which records are available.  About thirty members were carried on the rolls.

 

The League began its work with a crusade for the installation of electric lights in Po­tosi.  This campaign met with success in 1924.  The members also mounted drives to clean up the city gen­erally, with particular effort given to renewing the Catholic and Presbyterian cemeteries.  The League financed a Lyceum course during the summer months, and cooper­ated with the Washing­ton County Teachers’ Association in a high school scholarship program for students with the highest grades in the rural schools.  The League was also active in many charitable works, par­ticularly during the typhoid epidemics of the 1920s.  Food, clothes, bed­ding, and medicines were purchased and distributed to several needy families.  Blind children were aided by the League, which paid transportation and other expenses involved in sending them to the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis.

 

The earliest records of the League are missing.  The collection begins with minutes of the meeting of 8 October 1921, when the League affiliated with the Missouri Federation of Women’s Clubs.  About half of the extant records are minutes of meetings, with newspaper clippings de­tail­ing the work of the club tipped-in throughout.  The remainder of the collection includes mis­cella­neous records and “yearbooks,” small printed booklets containing statistics and committee assign­ments for the year.  Included with the League's yearbooks are those of the Potosi Woman’s Study Club.  Most of the Study Club’s members also belonged to the Civic League.

 

 

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