Twentieth Century Club

The club joined a statewide federation with a long record of building libraries. The Handbook of Texas says the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs began in 1897, when the Woman's Club of Waco called eighteen literary clubs together, and that in 1898 its members agreed to work for public libraries. At least 70 percent of the state's public libraries were founded with help from women's clubs. The federation, which may have peaked at 60,000 members in 1941, also backed the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

What the plaque says

Borger, the oil-boom town that sprang to life here in 1926, had among its otherwise transient and rowdy early citizenry, a social and professional group of people accustomed to a more refined cultural and literary environment. Such a person was Sadie McBride, society editor for the "Borger Daily Herald" newspaper. In early 1927 McBride arranged a meeting of several of her women friends to consider an offer by a sales representative of Berle's Twentieth Century Self-Culture Company to subscribe to a monthly book plan. McBride and her friends accepted and later that year organized the Twentieth Century Club of Borger. The club became a Federated Woman's Club and opened a subscription library on Borger's main street in 1928. The club sponsored fundraising activities, such as the exchange of books for movie tickets and women's basketball contests to augment their library collection. Club members' efforts to establish a county library in nearby Stinnett in 1937 resulted in the building of a highly praised native adobe brick branch library here by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938. The Twentieth Century Club helped open another branch library in nearby Fritch in 1967 and continues to be a positive influence in the county's library system. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — steps away
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 11 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 19 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 23 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.

More markers nearby

• Grand Hotel and Grand Hardware Building — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Borger — 0.5 mi
• Beale Road — 1.5 mi
• Site of John and Maggie Weatherly Half-Dugout Site — 1.5 mi