The Club “made history” in October 2025 by opening its “Women’s History Resource Center,” transforming the property’s original carriage house into a user-friendly facility featuring a conference room and Club office on the first floor and archive resources on the second.

The Women’s History Resource Center will:

• Provide safe climate-controlled storage of the Women’s Club rich archives dating back to its formation in 1895. Archives include everything from photographs and Club minutes, to glass slides, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks and more – originally found in shoe boxes    
• Serve as an ideal learning lab for Ohio State Marion students and interns, and others researching women's history
• Provide public access to one-of-a-kind records chronicling local women’s history and its impact on the local, state and national levels for more than a century
• Feature a meeting place for the Women’s Club and other organizations to gather

• Promote women’s leadership, public health, literacy, social services and advocacy for the Arts in a safe, secure place
• Provide a site for genealogy and family history research
• Serve as a cornerstone in rebuilding a formerly thriving part of the community, while further enhancing the property’s historical significance.

• 1895: A group of local women, including Ida Barlow, join to form a book club
• 1902: Members worked with schoolteachers to sponsor Marion’s first free public art exhibit featuring local artists, kicking off 120 years of club women promoting the arts.
• 1904: Members publicly urged city leaders to accept Andrew Carnegie’s offer to fund a public library. Completed in 1907, the new library included meeting space for “women’s clubs.”
• 1911: Members established a “Loan Scholarship Fund” to help local girls attend college. Club women have promoted and supported Marion women’s higher education ever since. Anna J. Whiting and Jeannette L. Hutchinson were the first women elected to the Board of Education.
• 1916: Member Louise Cunningham was the first woman appointed by the Mayor to the Public Library Board of Trustees.
• 1914: Members hired Marion’s first public health nurse. Club women paid her salary, rented her an office, and bought her a car (a Ford Coupe!) to visit patients around the county.
• 1918: During the Influenza Epidemic, members supported the city’s “emergency hospital,” recruiting and financing a team of nurses to fight the deadly flu.
• 1920: Members hired the first nurse for Marion public schools, supporting her salary and a nutrition program that provided daily milk and graham crackers to undernourished children.

• 1924:
  • Members opened and financed the first “free clinic” in Marion that offered medical and dental care to needy citizens. By the 1950s, the Federation publicly supported and fundraised for the new Marion General Hospital.
  • After serving as local Club president from 1923-1925, Florence Roberts Head worked with Martha Kinney Cooper, the Ohio governor’s wife, to create a library in 1929 that collected and promoted Ohio writers. Florence Head served as The Ohioana Library Association’s director for over 20 years.
• 1926: Members helped transform President Warren G. Harding’s home into a museum. Club women sold tickets for its grand opening and conducted the first public tours of the house.
• 1930s: As the Great Depression set in, Clubwomen supported Marion’s new “Welfare Center,” organizing clothing and food drives, and sponsoring a network of gardens and canning kitchens that produced food for needy families.
• 1945: Ida Barlow donated her home on East Center Street to the Federation. The “Women’s Club Home” became the headquarters for over 900 members who worked on projects through 31 different clubs.
• 1951: Mrs. Rose Nichols, President of the Jessie A. Gardner Federated Club, the Marion branch of the National Association of Colored Women, was invited to the Annual Meeting at the Woman’s Club to speak about her organization and its important community work.
• 1951: Clubwomen publicly demanded quieter, safer city streets and worked to bring about traffic-calming changes like the “One Way Street” pattern and a downtown truck ban.
• 1955: Members began raising money to support the education of mentally and physically disabled Americans, protesting the practice of shutting them away in hospitals or prisons.
• 1962: Members added an auditorium to the Women’s Club Home, naming it for Abigail Harding Lewis, club member, Marion educator, sister of President Warren G. Harding, and wife of R.T. Lewis, known in that time as “Mr. Marion.”
• 1994: After serving as both county and state treasurer, clubwoman Mary Ellen Withrow became the 40th Treasurer of the United States under President Bill Clinton. She is the only American citizen who has served as Treasurer at the local, state, and national level. She remains active in club activities, and supported the Club with a leadership gift, given to the Women’s Club fund at Marion Community Foundation.

• 2012: The Club’s extensive organization records, including correspondence, financial papers, meeting minutes, programs, scrapbooks and photographs, are discovered in a closet of the historic home. Now professionally organized and catalogued, this collection comprises one of the most complete archives of women’s club work and civic engagement in the nation.
• 2019:
  • The Club partners with The Ohio State University at Marion. At the Club’s invitation, Professor Margaret Sumner’s history students begin exploring Club archival material as part of her American women’s history course and serving as archival interns.
  • The Marion Women’s Club Home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
  • Inaugural “Turn Up the Heat” celebrity dance gala fundraiser (link to Events/Gala Fundraiser page} featuring local dancers, with funds raised used to replace the century-old boiler system – thus, the name, “Turn Up the Heat”). The gala has been a sell-out every year since.
• 2020: Keily Cunningham, the Club’s first professional archivist, is hired part-time to scan the Club’s collection of archives, forever preserving the history of the Marion Women’s Club.
• 2021: “Rah, Rah Roof” fundraiser supports new historic home roof
• 2022: “Ida Barlow Brilliance Award” ($1,000) is created to support the work of a local women whose program/project complements Marion Women’s Club mission; named to honor Ida Barlow, (link to ABOUT / Historic Barlow Home} an early member who urged her fellow clubwomen to think about ways to improve Marion, and who donated her home to the Club.
• 2022 & 2023 galas helped to support “Foundation/Front Porch Repair & Renovation,” the largest such project undertaken by Club members; Front Porch is re-dedicated in 2024, with longtime Clubwoman and former U.S. Treasurer Mary Ellen Withrow presiding.
• 2023:
  • The Marion Women’s Club is recognized by the Ohio History Connection with a bronze marker dedicated on the front lawn.
  • Women’s Club membership grows to nearly 100.
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• 2024:
  • Phase I renovation of the original carriage house into the Women’s History Resource Center is completed, thanks to State and local grants.
  • Phase II funds are awarded from the State to complete the carriage house renovation into the Women’s History Resource Center.
• 2025:
  • The Ohio State University honors the collaboration between the Marion Women’s Club and The Ohio State University at Marion as a “Program of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship” for demonstrating “excellence in community-engaged scholarship and meeting the criteria of high-impact engaged scholarship.”
  • The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution awards the Marion Women’s Club Home with the Historic Preservation Award for “outstanding achievements in all aspects of historic preservation.”
  • Marion Women’s Club adopts new logo reflecting its rich history and continued impact
  • Grand Opening/Ribbon-Cutting/Dedication Ceremony of the “Women’s History Resource Center”