A silver cup for Bend’s flowers

The club’s silver cup enters the record at a show run by the Ladies’ Library Club — and the paper already calls the show annual.

The first appearance of the trophy that outlived the club by decades. It went for the best all-round display of flowers and was to become the property of anyone who won it three seasons running; E. W. Richardson took it that year.

Two things in the report matter more than the prize. The show was “given under the auspices of the Ladies’ Library Club” — the same body that would hold a benefit dance in the Emblem Club hall in 1915 and take the whole building for the library in 1918. The club’s cup and the club’s building went to the same organisation, six years apart.

And the Bulletin calls it “the annual flower show” in 1912. That bears directly on an open question here: the 1925 prize list says “Twelfth Annual”, the 1927 report “14th annual” and the 1933 report “20th annual”, all of which count from 1914. A show already annual in 1912 cannot be the first of a series beginning in 1914, so the series was renumbered at some point and the archive’s three agreeing years agree about a later count rather than about the beginning.

The practical details are their own picture of the town. Rain and an unfinished building moved the show out of the O’Donnell building and into “the Johnson store room formerly occupied by Thompson, next to the Commercial Club”.

Flower-show notices would carry the Emblem Club’s name long after the club itself had gone.