Vero Beach Woman's Club

The Vero Beach Woman's Club building is a one-story frame clubhouse at 1534 21st Street, built in 1916 and enlarged in 1926 for a women's civic club founded in 1915.

The National Register nomination for the Vero Beach property describes a building with an irregular plan resting on a concrete pier foundation, with exterior walls of square butt shingles stained a deep brown and white corner boards. It calls the clubhouse a vernacular structure with Colonial Revival and Craftsman/bungalow stylistic elements, under a complex cross-gable roof of asphalt shingles.

The National Park Service NPGallery record carries National Register Information System ID 95000051 and a publication date of 2/10/1995, with 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.

The club began in February 1915, when twenty-seven women met in Vero to organize a club for the betterment of the town and to establish a library.

According to the nomination, they named the organization the Unity Club, but the name was soon changed to the Vero Woman's Club, and the club was admitted to the Florida Federation of Women's Clubs. Mrs. A. W. Young, wife of the mayor, was the first president. The nomination identifies A. W. Young as an official of the Indian River Farms Company who served as the first mayor when Vero was incorporated in 1919, so the club is older than the town government itself.

The state marker for the town treats the club as a milestone in its own right. Florida Historical Marker 375, titled City of Vero Beach and erected in 1975 at the corner of 21st Street and 16th Avenue, says the 1915 founding of the Vero Woman's Club was an act which signified the vitality of the new community. The marker traces Vero from the 1891 post office at the home of Henry Gifford through the 1912 charter of the Indian River Farms Company and the 1913 town plat, and it notes that the name changed to Vero Beach in 1925, when the town became the county seat of the new Indian River County.

A community library was the first major project of the club, and the 21st Street clubhouse held that library for decades after it opened in 1916.

The nomination reports that in April 1915 Vero club members began raising money and asking people to donate books. Mrs. Myron A. Hard gave 300 books from the library of her late husband, and the collection later became known as the Hard Memorial Library. In June the books moved to the enclosed back porch of the Young house, and members took turns serving as librarian.

In May 1915 the Indian River Farms Company donated a lot in its newly platted town of Vero to the club, and the women began working to raise the $1,000 a club building was expected to cost. Marker 375 confirms that the clubhouse was built the next year on land donated by the company. The new building opened officially in May 1916 with a community benefit dance, and five hundred library books were moved inside. A piano was bought for the clubhouse, and music became part of each meeting.

By the late 1950s Vero Beach had outgrown the club library, and in 1958 the club handed its books to a new Indian River County Library Association.

The nomination gives the numbers: in 1958 approximately 16,000 books were crowded into the small library room, and circulation had reached over 41,000. That year the Indian River County Library Association was formed, with Mrs. J. H. Conn, a Woman's Club member, elected president. The club gave its books, equipment and records to the new association and offered to house the library rent free for two years until a new building could be built.

When the Indian River County Library opened in 1962, the nomination says, the club had provided forty-five years of library service to the community. At the time of the 1995 nomination, the club remained an active service organization in Vero Beach with eighty members, and the form lists the current functions of the building as a clubhouse and a library.

The clubhouse is on both the National Register of Historic Places, under reference 95000051, and the City of Vero Beach Local Register, under Ordinance 2008-08.

The NPGallery record for the Vero Beach clubhouse lists two applicable criteria, event and architecture/engineering, and significant years of 1916 and 1926. The architect is recorded as unknown and no style is listed. The nomination explains the second date: the club was enlarged in 1926 by the addition of an auditorium, and the entrance porch was extended at the same time to give the auditorium its own entrance. The original building measured 18 by 24 feet and had a domestic look, while the 1926 addition, with its stage, let the club present plays and musical programs.

Locally, the city's Local Register page lists VB Women s Club at 1534 21st Street under Ordinance 2008-08, dated 7/15/08. 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.

Beyond the library, the Vero club planted street trees, sponsored youth groups and the local Red Cross, and lent its clubhouse to new church congregations.

The nomination lists the planting of trees to beautify the city's streets, sponsoring the organization of the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, P.T.A. and local Red Cross, driving polio victims to Coral Gables for treatment, a milk fund for school children, dances for young people and beautification of the Dixie Highway. The club also bought a piano for the Vero Beach school, sponsored the first community Christmas tree and four programs of the Lyceum Lecture series, and started the movement to hire a county nurse.

Meetings followed a fixed rhythm. The Vero club held two meetings a month, one for business and one for a program, along with card parties and sewing groups, and it organized departments for civics, music, mothers, home economics, library, citizenship and local history. Inside, the nomination describes a library room of 48 by 24 feet with pine floors and an auditorium of 45 by 43 feet with a stage at the north end. The building was described as in good repair in the nomination. Last verified: October 15, 2026, against the 1995 National Register nomination and NPGallery record, Florida Historical Marker 375, and the City of Vero Beach National Register, Local Register and historic preservation pages.