Due to the Eleanor Brackenridge Literary Club’s Trivia Night, female seniors from Ganado, Edna and Industrial high schools are awarded scholarships in the name of Eleanor Brackenridge and what she set out to do for women in Jackson County and beyond.
In 1901, Eleanor gave $100 to begin the club in Edna, which was the equivalent of somewhere between the amount of $3,800 to $3,950. And that was just a part of what she would do for women and education throughout her life.
The club will celebrate 126 years in September.
Diann Walleck, longtime member of the EBLC, has given talks about who Eleanor was and the things she did in her lifetime, becoming quite knowledgeable about her and her family.
“Eleanor went to the University of North Texas for women, and she personally paid for the first dormitory,” Walleck said. “Back then they had classes in the industrial arts, meaning, classes which taught women how to run a good household. As time went on, it gave way to teaching about other subjects as well.”
Currently, the student union building at the University of North Texas in Denton is named after Eleanor Brackenridge.
The first EBLC was actually founded in San Antonio, and Edna was the second one, although Walleck said Eleanor wished she would’ve started the club when she lived in Edna.
“Out on their plantation they built the church, which is the oldest one in Jackson County. She also brought in the workers’ kids and educated them,” Walleck said.
“Because Eleanor was educated, she went to a women’s female academy in Albany, Indiana to study more than just the industrial arts, like Latin, mathematics, chemistry and other related subjects.”
Neither Eleanor nor her brother ever married, and after their father died, their mother didn’t want to live in the Edna house anymore, due to superstition, so Eleanor bought her mother and brother a house in San Antonio.
That house is named Fern Ridge, because bracken in Scottish means fern, and the land they owned in Edna is now what’s known as Brackenridge Park.
“Both she and her brother owned several banks in San Antonio, especially back when women were never on a board of anything,” Walleck said.
Eleanor was the first woman to be registered to vote in Bexar County, and made a big impact with her work to get women the right to vote.
Walleck said that under Eleanor’s guidance, the clubs turned their attention from literary studies to the need for police matrons, female probation officers, and vocational education, not to mention the general welfare of women and children.
“She made a study of the state’s legal code, and published a pamphlet called ‘The legal status of women’ in 1911, and I’ve never been able to find it,” Walleck commented. “She tried to improve the rights of married women to conduct business and own property, and it all started right here in Edna.”
The EBL Club began the local library in Edna, although the county took it back in the 1950s because, ‘women didn’t possess the ability to operate them.’
“It was literally in the minutes. The library was first in the basement of the old courthouse, they took it away, and women didn’t have enough power to do anything about it back then.”
The Eleanor Brackenridge Literary Club still contributes to the library, educating women, supporting domestic violence prevention, and will continue to do so. Programs during their meetings are about health, keeping people safe, and lifting women.
“We wouldn’t have the club without her, we wouldn’t have the aims we had without her,” Walleck said. “So we’re still doing what she proposed for the club, and she began it with $100.”
Fun fact: Eleanor’s father loaned books to Abraham Lincoln.
The need to educate others also lived in her brother’s heart, who attended the University of Texas, and saw to it that black men were able to be educated before the 1950s.
To learn more about joining the EBLC, one can call Diann Walleck at 361-9201909. Their trivia night has been ongoing for 16 years, and they’ve enriched over 182 Jackson County girls with scholarships.
