HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Zada Jane Sanders Kelly

Groesbeck, Limestone County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Daughter of local pioneer, Mr. and Mrs. J. Cull Sanders, and graduate of Kidd-Key College. Married C. D. Kelly in 1910. A Groesback clubwoman; served as treasurer, Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, when state headquarters were being built in Austin. Recognized nationally, she was awarded a certificate of honor in 1964 by the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Member of Limestone County Historical Survey Committee. Recorded 1969

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

A daughter of local pioneers and a graduate of Kidd-Key College, Zada Jane Sanders Kelly became a leading Groesbeck clubwoman in the early 20th century. She served as treasurer of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs during the building of its state headquarters in Austin, and in 1964 the General Federation of Women's Clubs honored her with a certificate of national recognition. She also worked to preserve local history through the Limestone County Historical Survey Committee.

Why it matters

Her career illustrates the powerful role of the women's club movement, through which American women built civic institutions and exercised public influence long before they held formal office.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • ยท Zada Jane Sanders Kelly
  • ยท C. D. Kelly

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Miss Rogers' Music Room

Mexia, TX

In the small Central Texas town of Mexia, Laura T. Rogers ran an extraordinary music school directly across from the public school for four decades beginning in 1880. From dawn to dusk, six days a week, she drilled generations of children on four pianos at once, sometimes eight students playing together, and staged recitals and dramas that spilled into the yard. As a longtime church organist and choir director, she made music a fixture of community life in an era when small towns built their culture themselves.

Mrs. Martha Rogers

Lost Prairie, TX

According to family tradition, Martha Rogers was born in the 1790s as a daughter of U.S. Army General James Wilkinson, and was said to have been disinherited when she married Benjamin Rogers in Alabama in 1809. The couple raised ten children before Martha, widowed, made the long move to Texas in 1847 with three of her grown sons. She settled at the Lost Prairie community, living out her years as one of the region's early Southwestern pioneers.

Mrs. Mary E. Reeves

Lost Prairie, TX

Born in Georgia in 1828, Mary Ellephan Hawkins married William Jay Reeves in Alabama in 1847 and moved with their young children to Texas around 1855. When her husband went off to serve in Company F of the 15th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War, she held the family together at home, shouldering the hard work of a wartime household. Her descendants went on to become physicians, lawyers, bankers, and citizens in many walks of life.

Mrs. Lucy Haggard Longbotham

Wortham, TX

Lucy Haggard Longbotham (1793โ€“1873) was born in the raw territory south of the Ohio River that became Tennessee, one of nine children of a Virginia-born Baptist minister. She moved to the Alabama frontier around 1814, married in 1820, and eventually came to Texas โ€” living, the marker notes, under nine different territorial, national, and state flags in a single lifetime, and raising nine children of her own.