Vero Beach Woman's Club — Vero Beach, Florida

The Vero Beach Woman's Club building is a one-story frame clubhouse on 21st Street in downtown Vero Beach, put up in 1916 by a women's civic club that had organized the year before. According to Clio, the one-story frame building has an irregular plan and rests on a concrete pier foundation. Reporting from 2021 and 2024 shows the club still meeting and holding events there more than a century later, on a lot inside the planned town that the Indian River Farms Company laid out west of the railroad in 1913.

Federal recognition came in 1995. The National Park Service NPGallery record carries National Register Information System ID 95000051 and a publication date of 2/10/1995, and it gives the clubhouse areas of significance in social history and architecture. On the City of Vero Beach National Register page, the Vero Beach Woman's Club appears in the same list as the Vero Theatre, the Maher Building, the Vero Beach Diesel Power Plant and the Vero Beach Railroad Station, so the clubhouse is one of a small set of federally listed buildings inside the city limits.

The club is older than the clubhouse and older than the city name. Clio records that in February of 1915, twenty-seven women met in Vero to organize a club for the betterment of the town and to establish a library. The group first called itself the Unity Club; the name was soon changed to the Vero Woman's Club, and the club was admitted to the Florida Federation of Woman's Clubs. Mrs. A. W. Young, wife of the mayor, served as its first president.

Vero News identified that founder in a March 10, 2021 notice as Irene Young, wife of Anthony W. Young, who became the first mayor of Vero when the town incorporated. The same notice points out that the Vero Beach Woman's Club predates both the incorporation of Vero Beach and the 1925 creation of Indian River County out of St. Lucie County, which places the club among the earliest organized institutions in the community.

The state marker for the town treats the club as a milestone in its own right. Florida Historical Marker 375, erected in 1975 at the corner of 21st Street and 16th Avenue, says that the 1915 founding of the Vero Woman's Club was an act which signified the vitality of the new community. The same marker traces Vero from the 1891 post office at the home of Henry Gifford through the Indian River Farms Company charter of 1912 and the 1913 town plat.

A library was the first goal written into the club's purpose, and it shaped the early life of the building. Clio reports that in April of 1915 the women began raising money and asking for book donations. Mrs. Myron A. Hard gave three hundred books from the library of her late husband, and the collection later became known as the Hard Memorial Library. In June 1915 the books moved to the enclosed back porch of the Young house, and members of the Vero club took turns serving as librarian.

The clubhouse gave the collection a permanent room. In May of 1915 the Indian River Farms Company donated a lot in its newly chartered town of Vero, and the women set out to raise the $1,000 that a clubhouse was expected to cost. When the building on 21st Street opened in May 1916, five hundred library books were moved inside. Clio states that for over forty years the women of the club operated the only library facility in the community from this building, which made the Woman's Club the keeper of the town's reading room through its early decades.

The NPGallery record for the Vero Beach Woman's Club lists two applicable criteria, event and architecture/engineering, and gives significant years of 1916 and 1926. Its periods of significance run from 1900 to 1924 and from 1925 to 1949. The architect is recorded as unknown and no formal style is listed, which fits a modest frame building raised by a volunteer club on a budget of about $1,000 in the first years of Vero.

The second date matters. Vero News described the historic building as completed in 1916 and enlarged in 1926, the year after Vero Beach became the county seat of the new Indian River County. The enlargement is the reason the listing covers two periods rather than one, and it explains the irregular plan that Clio describes. Vero News also gives February 1995 as the month the clubhouse joined the National Register of Historic Places.

Locally, the listing ties the clubhouse to city review. The City of Vero Beach states on its National Register page that its Historic Preservation Commission is responsible for reviewing National Register nominations within the city. The city's historic preservation overview adds that as early as 1915 the Indian River Farms Company launched a City Beautiful Campaign, the same year the women of Vero organized their club around beautification and a library.

Once the library was running, the Vero club widened its work. Clio lists the planting of trees to beautify city streets, sponsorship of the organization of the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, P.T.A. and local Red Cross, help with a milk fund for school children, dances for young people, and assistance in the beautification of the Dixie Highway through Vero. The clubhouse itself served as a temporary meeting place for newly formed church congregations before they had buildings of their own.

Meetings followed a fixed rhythm. Clio describes two meetings a month in the clubhouse, one for business and one for a program, along with card parties and sewing groups. The club organized itself into departments for civics, music, mothers, home economics, library, citizenship and local history, and a piano purchased for the 21st Street building made music part of each Vero meeting. A typical program combined several musical numbers with the presentation of an educational paper.

The motto summed up the agenda. As quoted by Vero News, the club dedicated itself to making a beautiful Vero Beach and surrounding county the best place on earth to live, and the newspaper credits the Vero Beach Woman's Club with more than a century's worth of beautification and civic projects.

The building remains in club use. Vero News reported on March 10, 2021 that the Vero Beach Woman's Club would host an inaugural Mad Hatter's Tea Party at its landmark building in downtown Vero Beach to raise money for new Vero Beach Woman's Club Scholarships, run in connection with the Gifford Youth Achievement Center Scholarship Fund for female high school students heading to college. The notice said the club was experiencing a resurgence in membership, was reviewing plans to renovate the building, and that the clubhouse was available for event rentals at the time.

Restoration was still on the agenda three years later. On November 22, 2024, WQCS, the IRSC Public Media station, aired an In Focus segment on the Vero Beach club covering its history since 1916, its upcoming events and an important restoration project. The Florida Historical Marker at 21st Street and 16th Avenue, which the marker text describes as near the clubhouse, remains the public reference point for the 1915 founding and the 1916 building.