Woman's Club of Coconut Grove, Women's club building in Coconut Grove, Miami, United States
The Woman's Club of Coconut Grove is a rectangular building completed in 1921 to a design by architect Walter de Garmo, built with oolitic limestone, concrete, stone and stucco. It has a curvilinear gable roof and a wrap-around porch with a series of recessed, semicircular arches.
The Housekeepers Club held its first meeting on February 19, 1891, in the one-room schoolhouse its members had funded, the first public school in Miami-Dade County. It was Florida's first federated women's club. In 1957 members renamed it the Woman's Club of Coconut Grove, and in 1921 they moved into a building by architect Walter de Garmo, listed on the National Register in 1975.
The club's name changed from Housekeepers Club to Woman's Club of Coconut Grove in 1957. Its offshoot, the Pine Needles Club, founded in 1895, gathered girls for weekly outdoor readings of adventure novels about the Seminole and the Everglades. In 1921 the club founded a community fine arts board that staged outdoor theatre and pageantry with amateur local actors.
The clubhouse stands at 25.726944, -80.24 in Miami-Dade County, within Coconut Grove. The 1921 Walter de Garmo building is a private clubhouse, so visits depend on the group's own events rather than fixed public hours; the National Register listing dates from March 26, 1975.
The 1901 lending library was not the first step: an 1895 donation of reading materials by Louise Carnegie, wife of Andrew Carnegie, let the club open the Coconut Grove Reading Room above a general store. The collection grew until members raised funds for a library branch on land donated by Ralph Munroe.
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