Gertrude Clarke was born on October 7, 1867, in Bellevue, Nebraska, the same year that Nebraska Territory became a state. She was the seventh child and only daughter of Martha Fielding and Henry Tefft Clarke, a pioneer legislator, freighter, bridge builder, merchant and road builder, to name but a few of his manifold enterprises. One can readily understand where his daughter got her ambition and drive and, not incidentally, a portion of her great wealth.
Records indicate that Gertrude Clarke was educated primarily by tutors in her early years and later did independent study in the Sorbonne. Her education was enriched by travel in Europe and South America, where she developed her interest in French and Spanish literature and art.
On June 4, 1906, at age thirty-nine, Gertrude Clarke married Matthew John Whittall and came to live in Worcester in the family mansion, Hillside, at the corner of Cambridge and Southbridge Streets (sadly, demolished in 1946 to make way for an A&P Grocery store). Matthew Whittall was sixty-three at the time of his second marriage and had been a widower for eleven years. Whittall had emigrated from Kidderminster, near the Welsh border in England, where carpet weaving was the principle industry. He left school at age fourteen and rose rapidly through the ranks in the carpet works until an opportunity came to become superintendent of the Crompton Mills in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1880, he began his own manufacture of carpets in a leased building in south Worcester where he established the largest carpet manufacturing factory in the United States, if not in the world, Fifteen hundred skilled workers were employed in the mill in its heyday. The mills endured for eighty four years, closing forever in 1964.
One wonders how Gertrude Whittall, a Nebraska native, viewed her new home; Worcester was a relatively small but thriving industrial city of about 170,000 inhabitants (3,000 newcomers each year), many of whom were recent arrivals in America. She and the Whittall family were the cynosure of what was essentially a village within a city, a segregated enclave of mostly English immigrants who had come to Worcester with their iron loom shuttles and scissors to work in the Whittall Mills. They worshipped in St. Matthews Episcopal Church, largely financed by Matthew Whittall, directly across the street from the family manor house, Hillside. The workers sent their children to Cambridge Street School beside the owner's home, where they were permitted once a year to walk through the gardens. They played on Whittall sports teams and enjoyed company outings, minstrel shows, and picnics and, of course, they and thousands before and after worked in the Whittall Mills.
It was while Gertrude Whittall lived at Hillside that she was first exposed to chamber music, when the Flonzaley String Quartet played at a private concert for the family. So interested did she become that she engaged Bedrick Vasca of the first cello section of the New York Philharmonic to travel to Worcester once a week to give her lessons on the cello. Later in her life music would become one of her consuming passions, and she became one of the country's major musical philanthropists to the Library of Congress.
Before she left New England in 1934, she had formed her famous collection of five Stradivarius instruments: three violins, one cello, and one violoncello, For each instrument she acquired an appropriate bow, made by Francois Tourte, famed master of bow making. In 1935, these instruments were donated to the Library of Congress, where they are preserved and, at Gertrude Whittall's express wish, used in concerts for the benefit of the American people. That same year, 1935, she established the Library's Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation to insure the perpetuation of the Stradivarii, their care and preservation. In addition, she donated the Whittall Pavilion, one of the Library of Congress's most attractive rooms, to house the instruments. Quite literally, thousands of concerts have taken place under the auspices of the foundation, many of which were broadcast on radio.
Through the years, Gertrude Whittall repeatedly enlarged the endowment she had given to the Library of Congress and made it possible for the Library to acquire a collection of musical scores which she subsequently supplemented many times, to form the famed Whittall Foundation collection of Autograph Musical Scores and Autograph Letters, Original manuscripts include those of composers such as Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, among others, To name ail of the musicians who have appeared in the Library's hall through the generosity of the Whittall Foundation would be to name the finest artists in the world.
Yet another of Gertrude Whittall's passions was literature. In 1950, she established the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund at the Library of Congress. The fund has enabled the public to hear poets reading their own works, actors interpreting Shakespeare and other great dramatists, and critics lecturing on literature. To augment this program, Mrs. Whittall furnished a Poetry Room where the poet Robert Frost, among many other noted poets, presided, a room where great friends met and would gaze out upon the Capital.
Mrs. Whittall was honored on multiple occasions for her many benefactions. At one of these tributes, Robert Frost said, "Having you in Washington is like having seeds of fire on the hearth that only need a scrap of manuscript for tinder to burst into flame with the passing breath of inspiration."
In 1963, the Commissioners of the District of Columbia honored her with a citation, recognizing "her gifts to the music and literature of the people of the United States." Gertrude Whittall died on June 30, 1965, age ninety-seven, after having slipped in the foyer of her hotel and broken her hip. The Washington newspapers carried extensive coverage of her life and the profound impact of her contributions to the nation. The Library of Congress acknowledged the nation's debt to Gertrude Whittall, declaring, "Her generosity had a profound influence on the history of music in the United States and laid the cornerstone for ail subsequent musical philanthropy in the Library."
by Sid Callahan, Worcester Garden Club, 2011.
Gertrude Whittall and Frances Clary Morse were co-founders of the Worcester Garden Club in 1919. They were remarkable women. They would be deemed extraordinarily gifted in 2011, but how much more so were they in the Victorian era of their birth and nurture.
The two women had much in common. Both were daughters of self-made men who were prominent in civic affairs in their adopted cities. Neither woman had formal education beyond high school, yet both were life-long learners, inveterate travellers sometimes making year-long journeys, and both were musicians, Mrs. Morse was a notable pianist, while Mrs. Whittall was a student of the cello. Of paramount importance to the history of the Worcester Garden Club, both were knowledgeable, dedicated and generous gardeners.
The Worcester that saw the founding of the Worcester Garden Club was a booming industrial city of more than 170,000. The city had multiple, successful manufacturers: the largest wire factory in the world, Washburn Moen; the largest loom works, Crompton Knowles; the largest manufacturer of grinding wheels, Norton Company; the largest leather manufacturer, Groton and Knight, the largest carpet manufacturer, M.J. Whittall. The list goes on and on. For thirty years, at the turn of the century, an average of 3,000 people annually settled in Worcester, while the student population in the public schools rose by 500 students each year. In testimony to the city's prominence, school children learned by rote, "Worcester is the largest industrial city in America not on a major waterway."
Worcester in 1919 boasted a Main Street with elegant clothing and department stores. The Bancroft Hotel in the center of the city had rooftop dining and dancing where Worcesterites could practice the Charlston under glittering stars. Lake Quinsigamond was a destination for rich and poor alike, and trolley service to the lake was reliable, popular, and frequent. Dozens of clubs representing different ethnic groups lined the shores. The Music Festival was a week-long event (formal attire on opening night, white tie and tails on Friday and Saturday), commanding the finest artists in the world who performed to full houses. The Worcester Art Museum and Worcester collectors were snapping up Picassos, Monets, and Renoirs - artists whose works are the glories of the Museum today. And anyone with access to the Worcester Public Library or a local book store could find authors like Willa Gather, Sigrid Undset, Joseph Conrad, Upton Sinclair, and Carl Sandburg. In City Hall the mayor and council were wrestling with the problem of converting the fire department to motorized vehicles and retiring the beloved station horses.
The year 1919 also saw the beginning of Prohibition. The law was deemed intolerable by many otherwise law-abiding citizens and clubs like the Worcester Club circumvented it by hiding bottles with members' names and, upon the appearance of an unknown nonmember, libations were served in a cup and saucer. One might think that the pleasure of the drink might be diminished in such a vessel. Perhaps not. A nonagenarian club member recently remarked that the police were far more "understanding" in those days.
The Worcester County Horticultural Society was another of the city's thriving institutions, and it was after one of the Society's exhibitions on June 19, 1919, that Miss Morse and Mrs. Whittall conceived the idea of a garden club devoted to the interests of women. Once the idea took root, the two women moved rapidly into action. Four days later, they met over luncheon at Miss Morse's to draw up a list of potential members; in another four days another luncheon was held at Juniper Hall, the Whittall mansion in Shrewsbury. Ten days later Miss Morse called a business meeting of the Worcester Garden Club at her home at 27 Chatham Street in Worcester. The first full club meeting tookplace on July 19, 1919 at Juniper Hall" where the grounds had several hundred stalks of yucca in bloom and in the house were varieties of hollyhocks.
There must have been a coin-toss for the first president of the Worcester Garden Club, Perhaps the honor went to Miss Morse as a Worcester native, but her term was followed in short order by that of the co-founder, Gertrude Whittall. Two more talented and knowledgeable gardeners could not have been found to imagine and establish a garden club for women and provide consummate leadership for the fledgling organization. In 2011, as the Worcester Garden club approaches the century mark, we salute these two remarkable founders.
by Sid Callahan 2011
