East Glacier Park in Glacier County, Montana — The American West (Mountains)
Glacier Park Woman's Club
Photographed by Barry Swackhamer, August 21, 2020
1. Glacier Park Woman's Club Marker
Inscription.
Women, and especially club women, played outsized roles in creating and maintaining the community institutions - churches, schools, and libraries - that they and their families valued. Providing an outlet for women to exercise their leadership skills, women's clubs thrived in the late nineteenth century. By 1901, Montana alone boasted over fifteen women's clubs, with at least one in every major town. Helene Dawson Edkins, a Blackfeet woman and the adopted daughter of one of East Glacier's founding families, together with twenty-two other women, established the Glacier Park Woman's Club on December 4, 1920. While some women's clubs were stratified by race and class, the Glacier Park Woman's Club welcomed all interested women. Initially, members took turns hosting meetings in their homes. In 1928, they acquired this lot from the Great Northern Railway. In 1933, they donated the site to Glacier County so that the county could commission the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-ID) to construct this saddle-notched log library and community hall. Part of the "Indian New Deal." the CCC-ID employed 80,000 tribal members
Click or scan to see this page online
across the county to work to improve their reservations through pest control, weed eradication, and building projects, including dams, roads, fire lookouts, and other structures. The federally funded program could not perform work for private organizations, but after the hall was completed, the county deed it back to the club. The hall is a good representation of Rustic architecture, a style associated both with par architecture and the CCC. The building continues to serve the community as a library, meeting space, and social center.
Location. 48° 26.568′ N, 113° 13.08′ W. Marker is in East Glacier Park, Montana, in Glacier County. It is at the intersection of U.S. 2 and Glacier Avenue, on the right when traveling north on U.S. 2.
Photographed by Barry Swackhamer, August 21, 2020
2. Glacier Park Woman's Club and Marker
While technically the address of the building is 25 Glacier Avenue, the building's entrance and the marker are on U.S. Highway 2. Touch for map. Marker is in this post office area: East Glacier Park MT 59434, United States of America. Touch for directions.
Regionally, this marker is in Western Montana and in Glacier Country. It is also in the American Mountain West and in the Lewis & Clark Corridor. Globally, it is in North America, the Rocky Mountains, the Western Hemisphere, the Western World, and the Anglosphere. Historically, it finds itself in what was once Rupert’s Land and also the Louisiana Purchase.
Credits. This page was last revised on December 27, 2024. It was originally submitted on November 29, 2020, by Barry Swackhamer of Brentwood, California. This page has been viewed 419 times since then and 39 times this year. Photos:1, 2. submitted on November 29, 2020, by Barry Swackhamer of Brentwood, California.
