“Nonsense,” said the City Council.  “Besides, where is the money to come from?”

“We’ll establish the flower market and show you,” returned the club.

They did.  They found a centrally located square, the place where people would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cut flowers.  Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually confined to a few individuals.  The city authorities discovered that the flower market filled a long-felt want.  So the city took the market over.

These activities were more or less local.  Others, begun as local affairs, ultimately became national in scope.  The movement which has resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for children began as a women’s club movement.  For a dozen years before the Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women’s clubs all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.

Pittsburg affords a typical instance.  In 1896 there was a Civic Club of Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of Pittsburg and Allegheny.  At the head of its Education Department there was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.  Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn’t bear the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets and alleys.  Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.

“Those children,” Miss Kennard told her club, “have got to have a decent place to play this summer.”  And the club agreed with her.  The treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in.  There was no trouble about getting the sixty together.  They came, a noisy, joyous, turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one another:  “What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we’ve got them here?”

With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them successfully in the playground.