The club’s last recorded gift

In 1918 the Emblem Club lent the library its building. Twenty years later, the library’s own building was paid for partly with Emblem Club money.

When Bend built its library in 1938, the paper set down where the money had come from — the P. E. O. Sisterhood’s four years of raising, the interest on its fund, and two gifts from other clubs. The Emblem club’s is the second of the two.

The gift carries no date. It is counted into a running total beside years of accrued interest, so it might have been made at any point across a decade, and the notice is a retrospective rather than a report of the gift itself.

It is not evidence that the club still met. What it does is close a circle: the club’s first recorded civic act was lending the library its own building in 1918, and its last was helping pay for the library’s.