By Phil James
![Miss Crozet Pageant, 1950, at Crozet Theatre. Organized by the Woman’s Club of Crozet, the event’s chosen one, Nancy Hughes [Fox], continued on to be crowned Miss Albemarle, as well as the first Queen of the Apple Harvest, forerunner of today’s Dogwood Festival. L-R: Dorothy Dale, Nancy Brown, Betty Jones, Lucy Hicks, Roxie Cook, Joan Hippert, Irene Hicks, Ann Black, Connie Daughtrey, Nancy Hughes, Mary Black, Myrle Shiflett. (Photo by W. Hubert Gentry; courtesy of Woman’s Club of Crozet). Additional photographs accompany the print version of this article.](https://www.crozetgazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Womans-Club-02.jpg)
Civic-minded community members come and go. A community’s civic consciousness might ebb and flow as well. The village of Crozet long has been blessed with individuals and groups who took to heart the needs of their town and rallied others to help meet those needs for the betterment of all.
One such group that set a high standard for all community servants who would follow was the pioneer Crozet Woman’s Civic Club. Organized officially in April 1920, their objective, as recorded in the group’s constitution, was “the promotion of ideal conditions in the community—to make Crozet the most sanitary and most beautiful village on the highway.”
After five years, the organization’s name was modified to “The Woman’s Civic Club of Crozet.” In 1928, after years of holding meetings in the Bank Hall, at the schoolhouse and in various homes, they moved into their own new 24’x40’ clubhouse on the corner of Carter Street and Jarmans Gap Road. There they adopted the motto: “Labor conquers all things.”
Some years later, the group’s name was modified a final time, giving rise to its long-revered nickname, “The Woman’s Club.” For nearly a century around these parts, everyone knows the name refers to the community-minded Crozet women.
Operating on a shoestring budget, those dedicated women of early 20th century Crozet, “by every means at their command,” put their newly adopted motto to the test. To pay down their property and building loan, they engaged the community with “food sales, rummage sales, teas, dinners, plays, minstrels, pageants, dances, card parties, bingo parties, and, on one occasion, a golf tournament.”
To review the entire legacy of this stalwart group of ladies would be a herculean task, but a glance back through only its first dozen or so years of activities will leave one with no doubt that these women meant business!
Helping to tackle the club’s initial task of cleaning up litter on the village streets and vacant lots, 1920s schoolchildren competed for prizes by writing an essay on “How Our Town Could Be Improved.” High school students wrote on the subject of “Citizenship.” Boy Scouts made flytraps and competed to kill the most flies during the season. The scouts helped address the waste paper nuisance. The women purchased and placed trash receptacles around town and posted “attractively painted placards in stores and public places,” appealing for the community’s best efforts in keeping the village’s thoroughfares in good order.
They induced the town’s merchants to clean up their premises. They planted flowers and trees at strategic places, and donated funds to the school league for shrubbery for the school grounds. They purchased a flag for the school, donated funds to start the school library, entertained the teachers so that they and “the school’s patrons” could become better acquainted and work together more smoothly, and each Friday organized amusements for boys at the schoolhouse.
In spite of a timeworn adage implying there was no use to fight with the likes of city hall, “they dissuaded the C&O Railway from putting up an ugly coal house in the town Square across from the old depot, thus preventing a permanent eyesore in the heart of the village. Repeated appeals to the railroad resulted in 1923 in a new depot with landscaped grounds.” (Being on a roll, they also petitioned the C&O to heat its freight office for the benefit of its clerks. Apparently, no one had forewarned the ladies that the railroad barons were not to be challenged or trifled with.)
When prudent, they collaborated with the Men’s Civic Association and other civic groups in the county. After a fire engine was purchased for the village, they solicited funds to help pay for it. They publicized the mission of the Virginia Tuberculosis Society, and hosted well-baby clinics at their clubhouse in conjunction with the County Child Welfare Committee. At one point, they assumed committee oversight of the Albemarle County Children’s Home and provided many services and benefits to that work.
They inaugurated an annual village “Clean-up Day,” were active in Red Cross work, and organized a Law and Order Enforcement League. They had condemned bad cesspools and mosquito-breeding places, and appealed to the officers of the Crozet Cemetery to keep the grounds in “nice condition.”
Even a casual perusing of the Club’s annual scrapbooks show these tasks to be barely the tip of a great iceberg of organization, desire, and energy—attributes that were in no short supply among the membership of the Woman’s Club of Crozet.
Add to their list of accomplishments: the Christmas bags which were assembled and sent to servicemen overseas; magazines and newspapers taken to the hospitals; hot soup and cocoa served at the school twice weekly during the coldest winter months; donations to the National Community Fund, the Children’s Home and the Old Ladies’ Home; donations of playground equipment; sponsorship of 4-H Club programs; the erection of a community bulletin board; inducements for the placement of highway safety signage along the local highways and in the village limits—well, one gets the general idea.
The member who recapped the group’s early history in the introduction to their first club scrapbook in 1948 stated modestly that the club “has been a benign leaven in a growing complex community.” Her closing words still ring true today: “Crozet Woman’s Club… is still alive and eager to serve. Its worth in service to the community over the years cannot be measured. That service is a fitting monument to all of the incomparably fine women who have gone before.”
God bless them, every one!
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