Sisters of the clover club

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2001 by Kay, Martha R, Cornelius, Janet D

Many late nineteenth century literary clubs, including the Clover Club, got their start with Chautauqua, which began in 1871 as a religious-- based popular education movement, the "public radio and TV of its day." Despite its strongly Protestant religious base (its founders and most of its early members were Methodists), the Chautauqua's appeal was largely secular. Its purpose was to promote broad education for self-realization and action. One of its founders, the dynamic John Vincent, perceived that there was a "hunger of mind abroad in the land." He promoted Chautauqua and its programs as a place for everyone who had the desire to learn. As he stated, study in the home and work place in the midst of life would "train men and women everywhere to read and think and talk and do; and to read and think and talk and do with purpose, and that purpose, that they may be." To carry out these goals, Chautauqua operated a summer school with courses in literature, science, languages, the arts, and religion, and also a traveling tent program for lecture series, concerts, recitals, and study groups. The tent program aroused and maintained interest in Chautauqua study in hundreds of communities including Danville, where the tent was regularly set up in Lincoln Park.6

Danville was a pioneer river town founded in the 1820s which had grown rapidly after the Civil War and was on its way to becoming a small city - 25,000 population by 1900 - when the Chautauqua movement touched its inhabitants. Railroad lines connected Danville to Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Coal mining was the area's major industry. Vermilion County ranked among the major coal-producing counties nationwide, but Danville also served as the county seat and as a market center for eastern Illinois and western Indiana. In the 1890s major downtown streets were paved and electric streetcars eased mobility. There was a "proliferation of millinery shops, dress goods establishments, haberdasheries, restaurants, cigar stores, saloons, music stores, bicycle shops." In 1896, due to the influence of local congressman and House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon, the construction of a local unit of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers added thousands of veterans and the staff to care for them to the city's economy. In education, public schools had superceded early seminaries in the city, and Danville High School capped the system in prestige with a grand new building in 1889.(7)

Few if any of the women of Clover Club had had a chance to attain higher education beyond what Danville had to offer. Many were daughters of established and prosperous pioneers in business and farming, but the opportunities for middle class education in the area ended with seminaries and private academies and Danville High School, a select private school until 1889. While these institutions' content and standards were considerably higher than those of today's high schools, Danville women missed out on the college experience.8 For women like these, most of whom could not attend Chautauqua's summer school, Chautauqua began the CLSC, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, in 1878. This four year Chautauqua correspondence course was designed to help adults past school age acquire a "college student's general outlook upon the world and life, and to develop close and consecutive thought."' It was especially valuable to women who were at home and had neither time nor means to go to college. The curriculum wove together threads of higher and adult education, religious education, and women's education. The CSLC correspondence courses were designed for individual or group study, but individuals found it difficult to proceed with study by themselves and, perhaps influenced by the general popularity of literary clubs, Chautauqua study circles took off rapidly. Danville's circles began as small groups which federated as the CLSC Circle and then spawned separate clubs, the longest lasting of which were the Danville Woman's Club and the Clover Club.10