Before the Temple · 1891–1929
The Garden Club’s flower shows
1928
From the source
“Prize winners in Heights Garden club show held Wednesday … at the hall, Harvard and Eleventh.”
Houston Post, November 23, 1929, p. 11. Clip sr1197965904, research archive. The item lists winners by flower category, beginning with the chrysanthemums, announced by the club secretary, Mrs. Schlegel.
Three weeks after the stock market crashed, the Heights Garden Club held its chrysanthemum show at the hall on this corner, and the Post printed the prize list, category by category, under Mrs. Schlegel’s signature as secretary. The club had made the hall its exhibition floor since 1928: bush distributions in late winter, flower shows in spring and fall.
Garden clubs were the great women’s civic network of the twenties, a national movement with real municipal muscle, and in a dry, deed-restricted streetcar suburb the flower show was serious civic theater: competition, judging, names in the paper. The Heights ran its version out of a Masonic hall.
The tradition is also a bridge between the corner’s two buildings. The 1929 chrysanthemum show ran in the old frame hall; when the marble temple opened, the club moved with it, and the April 1931 spring show set up in the new exhibition hall. Few institutions are documented in both buildings on this corner. The Garden Club is one.
The source
