Archive of the Thursday Club of Aurora 1896-Present

The Thursday Club is a women’s research club where members deliver papers they have written and socialize over tea, coffee, and confections. It has stayed virtually unchanged in format since its founding in 1896 and continues to be a center of intellectual and social life in the Village of Aurora. The club has met about nine times a year without interruption except during the pandemics of 1919-20 and 2020-21. A visit to the Thursday Club is described in detail in Ann Dodds Costello’s book Smart Women: The Search for America’s Historic All-Women Study Clubs (2015).

The archive of the Thursday Club is curated by the Aurora Ledyard Historical Society and maintained in the Village of Aurora Historical Archive. Its crown jewel is an unbroken set of every annual program of the club from 1896 to the present, listing paper topics and presenters and rolls of members and officers. The annual programs fill two large archival boxes. There is an additional archival box containing the minutes of meetings, most hand-written in bound volumes, histories of the club, lists of members, and more. A fourth archival box contains copies of the papers delivered in recent years.