Women Making Georgetown Shine
Volunteers and workers: Women enrich Georgetown in MANY Ways!
When women get together in groups for a purpose, things generally happen. Georgetown women organized—and continue to—in groups that could develop from church affiliation, women’s group chapter, school, or just because they see something that needs to be better.
Sometimes women met to educate themselves and enjoy books, music, and art together. But this was almost always accompanied by community improvement projects.
These three Barbaras typify women’s volunteer power. Former Southwestern University Dean Barbara Brightwell, left, spearheaded a load of organizations including the Georgetown Health Foundation and the Georgetown Community Clinic. Barbara Hallmark (center) helped the other Barbaras start Seeds of Strength, a women’s group that has raised nearly $2 million for many Georgetown charities. Former nurse Barbara Pearce (right) started The Georgetown Project and many other awesome community improvement programs. Learn more about women’s organizations below. Photo courtesy of the Austin-American Statesman
And these are not insignificant undertakings! In just one Georgetown women’s club in one year, members recently logged 27,000 volunteer hours. And that’s par for the course. Add up all the hours, and it’s likely an astronomical amount of time that women direct out of their already busy lives to make Georgetown better.
Of course, Georgetown men also contribute in many ways as well! Over the decades and continuing on, our volunteering men are a force that improves Georgetown, and we are grateful. Women have historically taken a lead in hands-on charity and civic improvement, however, and that trend continues and for decades has included women who work outside the home, sometimes as the sole breadwinner.
Laura Daniels led local ladies who started Georgetown’s first hospital.
Come explore some of these undertakings that resulted in a better Georgetown! And you’ll see how Georgetown’s women’s club expansion mirrored the same trend in the Progressive Era of 1890 to 1920.
But it’s important to remember that women provided some of the most essential work of the community on their own as well. Taking care of the sick and aged, for example, and birthing babies! Let’s start there.
Keeping Georgetown Healthy
What could be more fundamental to everyday life than health? Women kept Georgetownians healthy going way back, and healthcare providers are mostly women, here as elsewhere. Consider how Georgetown babies came into this world in our history. Before the early 1900s, most Georgetown births were attended by midwives. And even as late as the 1950s, the Williamson County health department promoted midwife education.
Midwife Angelica Alejandro Garcia
Meet Angelica Alejandro Garcia—she was a midwife attending many, many births in Georgetown’s Latino community. She helped birth babies during the 1920s and 1930s, notes the Georgetown Latino history Recuerdos Mexicanos, along with Mage Ramirez. People remember that the two women would help deliver women who didn’t have any money as well as women who could pay.
Midwife Mrs. “Granny” Taylor stands (rear, 4th from right) with this gathering of Friendly Will Baptist Church members.
Georgetown’s Black women relied on midwife Mrs. “Granny” Taylor, and they could also get birthing help from Dr. James Dickey, a Taylor doctor whose work helped infants thrive and who also kept a typhoid outbreak from spreading. Dickey opened a hospital in Taylor for Black people.
Working-class white women also used midwives frequently. Anna Gunilla Carlson immigrated here from Sweden in 1886, was trained as a midwife in Chicago, and came back to welcome over 4,000 babies in Georgetown, Palm Valley in Round Rock, and other central Texas homes before she died in 1972.
Amanda Jane Pate Gonzales delivered babies all around Williamson County in the decades around the 1870s, sometimes encountering unfriendly Indians, according to her greatgrandaughter Emly Hardy.
White mothers who used midwives could call a white doctor or go to the hospital (when Georgetown got a hospital) if needed. Latina women and Black women couldn’t use or afford the hospital. Mindful of this, white Georgetown doctor Douglas Benold would come deliver babies in homes in the Black neighborhood of the Ridge northwest of the square.
In the many years before Georgetown first got a hospital in 1918, those who could afford one would see a (male) doctor. But for all kinds of people in Georgetown, community women provided sick care. The foremost group were the women in the Silver Cross Circle of the King’s Daughters, the Georgetown chapter of a national interdenominational Christian group that focused on medical care for all community members.
Georgetown women sponsored a hospital room for Georgetown use in this Temple King’s Daughter-founded hospital.
The King’s Daughters chapter is considered Georgetown’s oldest philanthropic organization—one that lasted 63 years after its founding in 1897. The King’s Daughter name is from a Biblical verse, Psalm 45:13: “The King’s daughter is all-glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold.” The Georgetown King’s Daughters helped Georgetown citizens in need with clothes, food, and coal. They visited the sick and supplied nursing care and medicine. They contributed money for Georgetown residents who needed to visit the hospital started by the King’s Daughters women in Temple.
This newspaper report from 1912 outlined how women took responsibility for caring for the Georgetown’s sick and needy.
Ad for the Sanitarium
Around 1915, the Georgetown women started strategizing to start a hospital here. They began raising money, and gathered $3,500 to buy a double lot at 1508 and 1510 Ash Street. Many locals and businesses and churches donated money and labor.
The two-story King’s Daughters Sanitarium opened in 1918. The newspaper account describes a small but comprehensive hospital facility with an operating room, hospital rooms, staff rooms, kitchen, and dining room.
The Williamson County Sun noted that local leaders had been long calling for a hospital, and the Georgetown Young Men’s Business League (that’s the Young Men in their marching band below) had attempted to get a hospital going.
But, noted the Sun, “the credit of this enterprise belongs wholly to the King’s Daughters Chapter here, and pre-eminently to Mrs. J. M. Daniel.” Mrs. Daniel, you may recall, was Jessie Daniel Ames’ mother. Laura Daniel had and continued to do many projects to benefit Georgetown with charities and hosting progressive speakers with her Methodist women’s group at the First Methodist Church. Georgetown, said the Sun, is “bursting with pride.”
The Sanitarium promptly proved itself to be a critical tool for Georgetown’s health. The Spanish flu—the global epidemic that would kill at least 500 million people—came to Georgetown that same year. Young men with the Students’ Army Training Corps attending Southwestern got the Spanish flu.
All 26 of those flu patients admitted to the Sanitarium survived, and by treating the patients promptly in isolation, the Sanitarium kept the disease from spreading in Georgetown. The King’s Daughters women avoided a bad situation such as this crowded Spanish flu sick room in Waco at Camp MacArthur.
And be sure to take a fascinating look at how the Sanitarium, which provided hospital care for nearly six years, was the first of a series of foundational healthcare facilities that continue to serve Georgetowners. This short film and longer documentary, produced by the Georgetown Health Foundation, illustrates key players in this saga, including the Sanitarium women, many hardworking and brilliant nurses, and a dedicated team of doctors who kept our town healthy. You can also see that story in a book available at the Georgetown Library, which was produced by the Georgetown Health Foundation: Caring for Georgetown: The Story of Healthcare, a Hospital, and a Community 1848-2018.
The Sanitarium was purchased by a doctor, who used it for an office. In 1923, the Martin Hospital was built on University Avenue by Dr. Simeon Martin and his two doctor sons, John and Walter. Lula Walters Martin, married to Simeon, was a registered nurse who was head nurse and chief administrator at the small hospital.
That same site became the Georgetown Hospital in 1947, with another set of local doctors in charge including Dr. Hal Gaddy. In a few more years, Dr. Douglas Benold came to Georgetown to practice, and then Dr. James Shepherd. The three took over the now too-small hospital, modernized it, and added a new wing in 1965. The three, joined by Dr. John Webb and then Dr. Richard Pearce, brought innovations such as natural childbirth, years before Austin hospitals. The doctors also hired stellar women who guided and enacted high-quality healthcare.
One major innovation was bringing on Georgetown women of color to work, even as the doctors feared white Georgetownians would not accept their nursing care. Dr. Douglas Benold explains how he and Gaddy worked with their nursing director Mimi Kalmbach and local Black and Hispanic women to establish a LVN (Licensed Vocational Nurse; similar to a Licensed Practical Nurse) school. Women leapt for the opportunity! Here are the 1963 LVN grads.
L-R: Dr. Doug Benold, Golden Munson, Chip Richarte, Miriam Kalmbach, Dr. James Shepherd, Katherine Kelley, Martha Tilden, Jovita Richarte, Dr. Hal Gaddy; photo courtesy of the Williamson County Sun
Get great details on these groundbreaking LVNs and other female healthcare experts in the Caring for Georgetown book and videos (links above), as well as this spotlight on Jovita Richarte, Chip Richarte, and Ramona Meza Jasso. Here’s a sampler.
· Cheryl Spicer Harrison was an LVN program graduate and she still works at the our current hospital keeping Georgetown healthier! Cheryl was a Georgetown High School freshman for the first year of mandated integration, and she recalls that the first few years were challenging. But she quickly became known and appreciated for her warmth and humor.
Cheryl and the LVN class of 1977: L-R Janet Brown, Joyce Tanguma, Sheryl Dryden, Marilyn Abbey, Cheryl Spicer; photo courtesy of the Williamson County Sun and Caring for Georgetown
Cheryl (second from left) with coworkers in more recent times; photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
After working as a nurse’s aide at the Wesleyan Nursing Home, Cheryl took the LVN course, and started at Georgetown Hospital, then still on University. She worked in obstetrics and medical-surgery and then became an emergency technician for several years. She continues her nursing in outpatient surgery.
Gertrude Munson, photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
· Golden Munson earned her nursing degree at the Physicians and Surgeon’s Hospital in Taylor in 1924 and came to work at the Martin Hospital. She stayed as the hospital grew, prized by doctors and patients alike. She was so dedicated that for years she stayed on 24-hour call in a small apartment at the hospital.
· Gertrude Saterfield was well acquainted with the “Black ward” of the hospital before it was abolished with the 1965 modernization. She gave birth to her first child in the segregated area that had to be entered through the kitchen. She recalls the ward for the Caring for Georgetown documentary.
Gertrude had graduated from the segregated Round Rock Hopewell school, and then completed the LVN course in 1968. She went to work at the hospital for 12 years, taking on responsibilities in every area. After working for Dr. John Webb as a clinic nurse, she returned to the hospital and ended up a 30-year career in the highly-regarded rehabilitation department.
· Sisters Nora Rose and Birdie Shanklin grew up on the family farm near Berry Creek, and both dedicated their careers to Georgetown healthcare. Birdie started out as a nurse’s aide at the Wesleyan Nursing Home—”my first real job after picking cotton,” she noted to Caring for Georgetown. She became a ward nurse at Georgetown Hospital, following her friend Frances Arldt. She moved to the current Georgetown hospital and even after retirement, continued to volunteer there for years.
Healthcare heros assembled for Caring for Georgetown, L-R: Gertrude Saterfield, Nora Rose, Cheryl Spicer Harrison, Caring for Georgetown author Mary Steger, Birdie Shanklin, Frances Arldt; photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
After graduating top of her class from the LVN program in 1967, Nora Rose worked in several departments at Georgetown Hospital. But intensive care is an area some nurses avoided, so Nora jumped right in. She was Dr. Hal Gaddy’s favorite nurse, and one day when a cardiac patient needed a shock—a job usually reserved for doctors and experienced RNs—Gaddy asked her to do it. Which she did just right. Nora and other selected nurses got additional cardiac care training at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, and Nora headed the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital for many years.
Irene Schwausch; photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
· Irene Schwausch is another nurse who went beyond the norm on a regular basis. This veteran of the Army Nursing Corps trained as a nurse anesthetist at the intense environment of Charity Hospital in New Orleans. She was adept at tricky spinal anesthesia, as well as ether, the norm then, which needed to be delivered with great care before the era of intubation. She’d drive in from Jarrell at all hours of the night to deliver anesthesia for emergency cases. Once she shocked the doctors during emergency surgery by quietly and expertly administering a special anesthetic that the doctors didn’t even know she knew how to administer!
· Miriam “Mimi” Kalmbach was an RN taking off time from having her first baby when Golden Munson drove out to Walburg to beg her to work at the hospital. Mimi quickly became head nurse, and over the next 30 years, she would initiate and oversee the LVN program and hospital administrator, mentoring many, many nurses and staff members.
Mimi Kalmbach; photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
Another claim to fame is Mimi escaping death because of her true-Texan devotion to hairspray. One September Saturday in 1974, Mimi had dropped by the Walburg Bank. Tragically, she walked into an armed robbery with the robbers shooting her, as well as her uncle and cousin who worked at the bank. The three survived, but the perpetrators killed DPS officer Hollie Tull when he stopped them while driving through Temple on their escape.
Mimi had a serious head wound that caused local docs to promptly send her to the trauma center at Brackenridge Hospital. But the day before, she’d gone to the beauty parlor to get her usual bouffant beehive hairdo, lacquered with a formidable finish of Final Net. The surgeon later told her that the hair spray helped form a clot to stem the head bleeding. As she recalled with gratitude, “That hair spray saved my life. It really did.”
· Women back then, as now, predominate in healthcare, and are largely responsible for all kinds of health care priorities. Such as an elemental need that we too often take for granted: clean drinking water. In the summer of 1980, Georgetowners contracted a crisis, which left thousands of citizens getting seriously ill with severe diarrhea and Hepatitis A.
Barbara Pearce was the infectious disease nurse at the hospital and she worked with local public health officials to track down the cause and find out how to stop it quickly. Due to the widespread illness, the federal CDC (Centers for Disease Control) experts came in, and Georgetown came under a national spotlight.
Part of Barbara’s job was to collect fecal samples from patients to identify the pathogen. She gathered a boxful and rushed them into the state health department in Austin for testing. As she headed in, she noticed a glut of news crews. When the employee there told her the samples couldn’t be tested for another three days—at which time they’d no longer be viable for testing—she told him that she’d tell the newspeople about this problem. She got the results the next day.
Barbara giving a tour of the hospital emergency room to schoolchildren in 1985; photo courtesy of Caring for Georgetown
City residents were still suffering and a few people died of Hepatitis A. The fault was found in old water lines along Railroad Avenue leaking sewage into the water supply, and the city rehabbed the system and build new sewage treatment plants. The outbreak, along with the burgeoning rates of AIDS and the Ebola virus, meant that Barbara had to devise protocols to make sure people in hospitals are safe from infectious agents. Which she did, educating both caregivers throughout the hospital and patients.
Barbara then went on to be a force in improving the physical and mental health of young Georgetowners in myriad ways as she founded and expanded The Georgetown Project. Visit the Project website to see all their awesome programs for mainly children and youth, but also programs for healthy and successful parenting.
The hospital expanded in 1979 at its current location at 2000 Scenic Drive, and is now called St. David’s Georgetown Hospital. Chances are that if you find yourself there, you’ll still find mainly women facilitating your hospital experience, from greeting to insurance intake to nursing and probably doctoring!
Women’s clubs in every neighborhood
Women in Georgetown gathered to do good starting from the beginning. Here’s a sampling of women’s clubs or groups, often affiliated with churches or schools or just common concerns.
Head over to the only place in town that honors a women’s club, with a marker on the Southwestern University campus on the ground near University Avenue and east of the beautiful old Cullen Building.
As the marker notes, the Woman’s Club resulted from a merger of three women’s study groups. Here’s what likely gave an urgency to the merger in 1917. Many Williamson women were hungry to get the right to vote, and a passionate suffrage advocate had recently come back to Georgetown, Jessie Daniel Ames.
Jessie saw that women would have much more power as a single group, so it’s likely that she was the force behind the merger, writes Kathy Sellers in her historical presentation to the Club in 2020. Jessie had only recently been invited to one of the original clubs, the Initial History Club. Yet Jessie was promptly elected the first president of the new Woman’s Club. The new name, Kathy writes, “would demonstrate the unity of Georgetown’s women, especially as they worked for women to have the right to vote.”
Read on to see how the Woman’s Club women supported our Williamson County suffragists. And check out their rigorous courses of study! And consider that the knowledge they acquired wasn’t simply for their own and the group’s edification. The ripple effect as they discussed and passed on their knowledge to their children, husbands, and friends would boost the educational level of the community.
The Woman’s Club women met weekly to discuss works by a wide variety of writers. They took a seven-YEAR dive into Shakespeare and English history, and they enjoyed writers such as “George” Elliott (the male pen name that Mary Evans wrote under to be taken seriously). They read “modern socialist writers of Europe” such as Russia’s Leo Tolstoy and the British political playwright George Bernard Shaw to apply the writers’ teachings “to similar conditions in the United States.” They discussed feminist author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, whose works defied gender stereotypes.
Author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Club discusses writer George Washington Cable
Club members didn’t shy away from controversial topics such as race. They studied the writing of George Washington Cable, who became vilified in the South because of his work about the cruel realities of slavery and race and class issues. George was wounded as a Confederate soldier, but his portraits of the post-war South were widely attacked, from his novels set among the Creoles of New Orleans to nonfiction books such as The Silent South.
A Woman’s Club report in the Sun in 1919 reads that Cable’s “sense of justice made him champion the cause of the negro and in doing this it followed that he pictured the narrowness of the Southern people.” Club members discussed “the negro question and its present trend.”
Women also studied art and music and domestic science, teaching “Hoover how-to” during the Depression years so they could cook with the cheapest ingredients.
The Club’s activities made a huge impact all around Georgetown. They supported the SU library, funded local schools and Southwestern with scholarships and books, beautified parks, and pressed for historical preservation.
As the Woman’s Club marker indicates, the club was founded in 1893 when Lula Holland Leavell and her two daughters, Blanche and Kate, hosted a literary discussion at their home at 803 College Street. Perhaps that’s Lula or Blanche or Kate in this photo!
The lovely Leavell home—find fascinating photos from the City of Georgetown’s collection provided by the Georgetown Heritage Society (now Preservation Georgetown).
Make sure to visit that home. The magnificent Queen Anne—all six baths and six fireplaces of it—is called the John Leavell House, and it was completed in 1890. Lula’s husband John did indeed finance it; he had amassed a good deal of money from his dry goods store on the square in the Makemson building and extensive real estate holdings. Club members enlivened it with their self-education and civic improvement planning.
When suffrage heated up in 1916 with the activism of Jessie Daniel Ames and others (find more on Georgetown suffrage here), the Woman’s Club members were foursquare in favor. They wanted to make sure women coming to register to vote in Williamson County were welcomed. So women took shifts to woman their meeting room in what was then called the Atkinson Building at 701 S. Main Street. They offered women a spot to use the bathroom and cool down after coming in from places all over the county by horse and buggy or car, maybe with children in tow to boot.
Suffrage-supporting shift workers for the Woman Voter’s Rest Room
The Woman’s Club here joined in with a national women’s club movement that was a beacon of the Progressive Era that flourished in the early 1900s and brought needed reforms and innovations of all kinds. Women generally joined clubs according to their skin color. While integration opened white club doors over the years, clubs still generally belong to two different national federations.
Federation founder Jane Cunningham Groly
The white women’s national club movement coalesced around the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which started in 1890. The spark caught fire when journalist Jane Cunningham Groly was incensed that she and other female journalists were barred from an all-male press club event for author Charles Dickens. She gathered like-minded women to form a Federation that continues today.
One of many successes was their push to clean up food production, such as the awful state of the meat processing industry. Club women wrote over a million letters and lobbied all the way up to President Theodore Roosevelt about the issue.
Women’s clubs are credited with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Women volunteered to be inspectors of food, and informed officials when food was at risk of sickening or even killing people, especially the aged or babies.
Meat industry given a closer eye after vigilance by women concerned with safety
Georgetown women wanted to ensure safe food as well. In 1908, the Woman’s Club hosted their district clubs of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs and invited the State Commissioner of Pure Food and Dairy to speak.
The international General Federation of Women’s Clubs continues, with members all over the US and abroad working in their own communities to support education and the arts, encourage civic involvement, preserve natural resources, and more. These days, the General Federation’s focus is fighting violence against women, and supporting fair pay and equal rights for women.
Check out the beautiful Texas Federation building at 2312 San Gabriel Street in Austin.
When the Texas Federation convened in 1898, the members wanted to work for the establishment of public libraries. Over the years, at least 70 percent of the public libraries in Texas were founded through the assistance of Texas women's clubs. Just a few of the other ways club women have improved lives for Texans include improvements in child health, better treatment of the mentally ill, natural area preservation, and more. The Federation was also instrumental in creating Texas Woman’s University.
Annie and J. M. Sharpe; photo part of the Sharpe collection available through the Williamson Museum at The Portal to Texas History
Another Georgetown women’s group allied with a national group was the Priscilla Club, begun by Annie Sharpe. She was married to J. M. Sharpe, who published the Williamson County Sun in the early 1900s. The Priscilla Clubs were literary study groups for women, who also did good works such as financial assistance for needy families and domestic workers.
The “Priscilla” name comes from Priscilla Mullins Alden, a member of the Plymouth Colony and a character in Longfellow’s 1858 poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish. In the poem, Priscilla tells John Alden, who is courting her on behalf of Miles Standish, to “speak for yourself, John.”
Black club women united in the federation begun by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who started the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896. Black women drew together in fury over a widely circulated letter from James. W. Jack, president of the Missouri Press Association, saying that all Black women were “prostitutes and all are natural liars and thieves.” Ruffin brought together women who were already working to better their community’s education, health, and jobs.
Of course, these women faced race as well as gender discrimination. They improved segregated schools and hospitals, and coordinated boycotts to protest segregated transportation and facilities.
The stately National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs headquarters in Washington, DC
The National Association continues with clubs in 32 states that raise money for scholarships for hundreds of thousands of young people, daycare and clubs for children, mentoring programs, and equal pay advocacy. From the beginning, voting access was a priority, and it’s still a primary focus in the Association’s grassroots and legislative action goals.
The Texas Association of Colored Women's Clubs was organized in 1905 and grew quickly. The word “colored” was dropped in 1982, and it became TAWC. TAWC also kept up the fight against lynching and for voting rights. And like all club women of any skin color, they simply enjoyed each other’s company! Here are the women of the Texas Association affiliate Douglass Club in Austin in 1915 or so.
The Austin Douglass Club is still alive and thriving! They sponsor youth activities, go on educational trips, and do voter registration. Here is a recent trip to lynching markers near their club house in east Austin.
For Georgetown’s Black women, getting together to do good often centered on their church, or a group that got together to support the school. Moms even organized children to do good work, from the
One longtime organization was the Heroines of Jericho, a women’s auxilliary to the Black Masons group. The white Masons group had long excluded Black Mason members here and everywhere else, so a group of Georgetown’s Black men started their own Masonic Temple. Black women started the Heroines of Jericho, and did public service.
The Heroines of Jericho, L-R back row: Beatrice Miller, Homerzelle Shanklin Guerra, Catherine Clarkson, Willie Hall, Elnora Miller, Edna Rose; L-R front row: Nevonia Robinson, Mabel Clark, Birdie Shanklin, Madella Hilliard, Tommie Shanklin (she was the Matron of Honor for the Heroines), Edna Powell. A few of the many cool connections: Mabel Clark is the mother of Ernest Clark, Southwestern University’s first Black student, and Beatrice Miller is the mother of Norma Clark, who painted the beautiful mural honoring Black community leaders by the Shotgun House Museum.
In the Latino community, the Los Unidos organization and women’s groups such as those springing from St. Helen’s Catholic Church (formerly at University and Timber) sustained their communities and beyond. The Getsemani Methodist Church women hosted fundraisers for children’s summer camps and more.
Georgetown’s Women’s Clubs
Here’s more about other Georgetown women’s clubs carrying on the torch today of strengthening our community.
The Georgetown branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has been around a LONG time. The Georgetown AAUW branch started about the time Jessie Daniel Ames began her suffrage work in 1916. She was their first president. The national AAUW has focused on educational equity and other ways to ensure fairness for women since 1881. Our Georgetown chapter has funded over $50,000 in scholarships—named of course after Jessie Daniel Ames!—for young women.
Georgetown AAUW members celebrate Equal Pay Day in 2018. Well, the fight for equal pay!
The San Gabriel Woman’s Club began in 1975. The Club is allied with the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The members have for years provided needed scholarships to high school women. They’ve raised thousands of dollars to donate to local organizations supporting abused children, teens in need, isolated seniors, and more. And they hold their suffrage rights dearly, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Wilco suffrage at the Courthouse in 2020!
Photo courtesy of the Williamson County Sun
WHO helps groups such as SKIFF: Soldiers Kids Involved in Fishing Fun.
Women Helping Others at Sun City: WHO teams with many wonderful local nonprofit groups such as Meals-on-Wheels, The Caring Place, The Nest Empowerment Center (help for at-risk high schoolers) and Brookwood BIG (helps people with mental disabilities) to aid crucial projects. In 2023 alone, the WHO women contributed over $160,000 to help our community’s children, seniors, and folks in need.
Seeds of Strength: Women in this “Giving Circle” have donated a phenomenal $2,000,000-plus in nearly 150 grants to many area non-profit organizations. Below are a few of the founders from left: Barbara Brightwell, Barbara Hallmark, and Barbara Pearce. They’re touring the Brookwood greenhouse where people with mental disabilities grow plants and vegetables to sell and serve in the café they staff.
Assistance League scholarship grad 2022 Christine Collins
Assistance League Georgetown Area: Our local league is one of 120 chapters nationwide, the fruit of two California women who in the late 1890s formed the first Assistance League to help poor children and old people. Since 1998, members here have provided school clothing for children; mentored children and donated books; engaged nursing home residents; given over $450,000 in scholarships to area high-schoolers; and funded teachers’ supplies.
Georgetown Area Junior Forum: This organization has sister chapters throughout Texas. Since 2006, members have helped out teachers who too often have to pay themselves for classroom supplies with funding for classroom materials and support for events such as book fairs and health screenings. They also give supply-filled backpacks to schoolchildren. In 2024, they awarded their first scholarship to Maeve Connerty, who headed off to Hardin-Simmons University.
P. E. O. of Georgetown: Over 100 women belong to the Georgetown chapter of an organization begun by Iowa college women in 1869. The initials stand for Philanthropic Educational Organization, and education was and is the focus of this international group. They offer scholarships, grants, awards, and loans to women.
Scurlock Farms vacation home outfitted by the Caring Place
The chapter began in 2022 and has used innovative fundraising tactics to raise scholarship money. They put together a package for quilting fans in the area to go to the huge international quilt show in Houston that made for a fun fundraising weekend. Board member Sheron Scurlock, owner of the Scurlock Farms vacation rental just east of Georgetown, sells pecans from her orchard to raise money and hosts fundraisers at the riverside property.
Sheron is also a board member of Caring Place. She highlights the treasures found at the Caring Place by completely outfitting her two vacation rentals—a big ranch house and a windowy studio used by her artist mother C. P. Montague—with furniture and furnishings from the Caring Place.
Women-founded Programs Making Us All Healthier
Women have started and grown many programs that have been incredible assets making our community stronger and healthier. Here are some of them.
Yoli Branson, cofounder of the Caring Place.
The Caring Place: Many know this bustling center on Railroad Street for its awesome thrift shop, but it has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of people in need of food, housing, and clothing help and expanded well beyond Georgetown.
Georgetown women Marty Maxwell and Yolanda (Yoli) Branson started the Caring Place in 1985 because they saw a need for people to get help with basic human needs. They solicited help from many area churches. Yoli and Marty launched the Caring’s Place from its very humble first home at 303 W. 8th Street, in a former slaughterhouse donated by the city.
The Georgetown Project: Barbara Pearce, an infectious disease nurse working at Georgetown Hospital, had a passion for helping children. She saw the need for an organization that would coordinate existing services for children and fill in anything else children needed. She made it happen, and since then, she has made the Georgetown Project a powerhouse. Barbara started the summer camp Kid City, the after-school leadership program ASAP, and more—plus she garnered big grants to fuel the burgeoning programs.
Barbara Pearce; photo courtesy of the Williamson County Sun
Barbara added parenting programs, mentoring programs, ESL (English as a Second Language) programs, and her many collaborators support lauded projects such as The Nest, a resource center for at-risk and unhoused children and teens. Finally, to appreciate how long Barbara has worked for better healthcare in Georgetown, watch this documentary that includes highlights going back to the 1970s and her smart work as an infection control nurse at Georgetown Hospital.
ROCK: Back in 1998, Nancy O’Meara Krenek was working as a physical therapist for the Georgetown schools. She saw that when disabled kids got a power wheelchair, it opened their sense of movement and freedom and possibilities. Then she saw a disabled child transformed through “hippotherapy”—riding on a horse. She began the process of opening ROCK, which now serves nearly 1,000 people monthly, children as well as adults such as veterans with PTSD and survivors of sexual abuse.
Nancy O’Meara Krenek
Nancy’s dream took years to actualize, but it was jumpstarted by a donation of 20 acres outside Georgetown to house the center from community pearls Barbara and George Brightwell. Over the years, Nancy has started a program for amputees at the Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio and started the Equine-Assisted Activities and Therapy Center at Texas A & M University. She has also authored research papers documenting the benefits of hippotherapy.
Nancy notes that when a person makes a bond of trust with a horse, they often demonstrate improved leadership in their own life and are able to let go of some things holding them back.