When the Belle Fleur Garden Club started compiling scrapbooks in 1968, its members didn’t realize they were collecting part of the history of the city.
But on Tuesday, the club donated five scrapbooks filled with news articles and photos spanning the club’s activities from 1968 to 2012 to the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System’s archives.
CLPLS Archivist Mona Vance-Ali said the archives have been collecting scrapbooks from local organizations and families as a way to capture otherwise unseen parts of history.
“The scrapbooks capture organizations, groups, different genders and different races that may often not be captured in traditional history texts,” Vance-Ali said. “So, let’s say a female in history may not have written letters that have survived, and she may not have pictures of herself that have survived, but her association with an organization … captures a part of her history.”
Garden club charter member Judy Livingston said she has been storing the scrapbooks in her home for the past several years. While the books now have historical value, Livingston also uses them as a way to see the faces of old friends she started the club with back in 1967.
“We were all young marrieds, and we were very interested in … gardening,” Livingston said. “… Our first meeting was at my house in the Downs, and we had a number of people who were born and raised here. We just had a really loose meeting and then we invited other people to see if they were interested, and that’s how we got started.”
Since the beginning, Livingston said, the club has been about good friends, but also community projects and fundraisers. Articles in just the earliest scrapbook, covering the club’s activities from 1968-1978, feature activities such as flower shows, supper parties, clean-up drives, planting trees, throwing holiday exhibits, sharing recipes and more.
“We have been a club that has done a lot for the city,” Livingston said. “If the powers that be have asked, we have stepped up. Whether it’s planting in the center (medians) down … Main Street or cleaning up Lee Park … I think we really do a lot of work in the community, and we have a reputation for that.”
But with the materials aging, club Vice President Lee Ann Moore said it was time to get the library’s archivist involved in their preservation.
“When someone told me about the archives and that they were accepting scrapbooks from different organizations, we thought that it would be a great place for our scrapbooks to be,” Moore said. “It was getting too hard to store them, and they were kind of starting to fall apart.”
Vance-Ali said the scrapbooks will be assessed and documented in their current condition and will be preserved whole, whenever possible. Otherwise, other steps may need to be taken to preserve the books digitally.
“We want to be able to preserve not only the item as a whole, but also the information on each of the pages,” Vance-Ali said. “And we want to understand in what order the items were put on the pages, because that may explain the thought process of the creator.”
While the physical scrapbooks ended in 2012, Moore said the club has not stopped taking photos and documenting its history. Instead, this is now preserved through the club’s Facebook page. But Moore said she has plans to compile those digital records into some kind of physical book to donate to the library, as well.
Livingston said she hopes the donation of the scrapbooks encourages the next generation to be active in the community and to connect with others like the Belle Fleur Garden Club members have. Moore added that she hopes the scrapbooks enhance the history of the city as a whole.
“We want more people to have the opportunity to see them,” Moore said. “… They’ll have the chance to see these books … and maybe it will open their eyes that they can see not only these books, but other photos and they can see the history of Columbus. And I think Belle Fleur Garden Club is a big part of the history of Columbus.”
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