The Founders
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Sarah Jane Orgain
Central Texas educator, founder of Bastrop’s first public library, and early philanthropist
Sarah Jane arrived in Texas by wagon train with her husband and infant son in the 1850s. During the American Civil War, she founded one of Bastrop’s premier early schools, the Colorado Institute, and ran it for thirty years, teaching, in some families, three generations. She founded and was president of Bastrop’s first public library, which opened in 1900. One of Bastrop’s earliest philanthropists, she helped fund the F. A. Orgain Hospital, the Baptist Mexican Mission School, and what was then the largest endowment Baylor University had ever received. Ever the adventuress, she died at age ninety-four in 1924 while on an exploratory trip to California.
Photo: Museum Archives 016.037.003
Drusilla Johnston Orgain
Social leader, author, and founder of Bastrop’s early “municipal (civic) housekeeping” initiative
Drusilla was Bastrop’s early civic conscience. She was among the first women to challenge the city’s elders during the City Cemetery Battle in the early 1880s, a struggle that ultimately led the city to entrust the care and maintenance of its most cherished historic landmark, Fairview Cemetery, to the Bastrop (Ladies) Cemetery Association. The association managed the cemetery for more than 100 years. As the idealogue of the Reading Circle’s founding triumvirate, Drusilla introduced Bastrop to the ideals of “municipal (civic) housekeeping” and made both those ideals and the Reading Circle’s role in advancing them her lifelong cause.
Photo: Jane Hunt Collection
Emma Holmes Jenkins
Early Texas journalist, premier educator, suffragist, and social welfare advocate
Emma established Texas’s first private normal school, a specialized institution that trained high school graduates for teacher certification and directed it for thirty-seven years. A prominent suffragist and welfare reform activist, she expanded the Reading Circle’s mission beyond its early focus on municipal housekeeping by partnering with the county nurse and home demonstration agent to address the social welfare needs of a predominantly rural county, including child hygiene, health, and food safety. As a well-known early Texas journalist, she encouraged her father-in-law, John Holland Jenkins, to write Recollections of Early Texas, now one of the best-known accounts of early Texas life. Her third great-grandson, John H. Jenkins III, published the memoir in 1958. The Bastrop Public Library was named in honor of her grandson, the John H. Jenkins Library, for a few years in the 1960s.
Photo: Virginia Gerstenberg