Members of the Laurel Nahoula Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution gathered for brunch in the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art Rogers Green House on October 3 to celebrate the chapter’s 110 years of service to the community.

The brunch was catered by Marilyn Fuquay. Nahoula Chapter President Cindy Rice introduced guest speaker Cindy McNamara, the state regent and a former member of the Laurel Nahoula Chapter who now lives in Jackson. She shared some of the history of the chapter.

“Coming here, I’m just flooded with memories,” exclaimed McNamara. She described how she made out her papers to become a member of the chapter sitting on a stool in the library of the LRMA where all the genealogical records were stored. To reflect on the type of influence the DAR chapter has had on the Laurel community, McNamara focused her talk on the 4th Regent of Nahoula Chapter, Catherine Larison Marshal Gardiner. Visitors to the museum will see a number of items donated to the museum by Gardiner, including the second smallest woven basket in the world that is among more than 200 woven baskets donated by Gardiner. According to McNamara, Gardiner served in several state offices including state chaplain and state historian in addition to being a chapter regent.

“In this chapter, we had five state officers, three state regents, three vice president generals, and one national officer,” stated McNamara. “This was not a little shy community. They were out serving. But it all started with Catherine.”

McNamara said in the late 1800s the Gardiner brothers, Silas and George, decided to move their families to Laurel rather than just pillage through the yellow pine timber that was found here and leave the land barren and the little shanty town deserted as had been done along the railroad in so many places throughout the South at the time.

“When Catherine Larison Marshal Gardiner arrived in the middle of the 1890s, this is what she saw. There were pig trails everywhere and it was stump city. It could have been called Stumpville,” exclaimed McNamara. “They had clear cut the whole downtown. There was probably no running water or glass in the windows of the little cabins. It was a disaster. But she saw a great vision that this could be a great place.

“There was a movement across the country called the City Beautiful movement, with the philosophy that if you make a town beautiful that the civic virtue would rise,” she added. “They wanted great monuments and great landscapes.”

Gardiner started the City Beautiful movement in Laurel by planting Oak trees and establishing the avenues. She wanted Laurel to have its own 5th Avenue. She had the streets designed so that the timber owners would live on 5th Avenue, the managers on the next street over, then the merchants would live on the opposite sides of those. Catherine and her husband, George Schuyler Gardiner, lived in where the St. John’s Day School is now.

“She had the great landscape architectures Olmsted and Vaux come down, the ones who did Central Park in New York, and they did a park system for us,” said McNamara. “Actually, we became known as the best park system of any small city in the United States, recognized officially by the National Recreation Association.”

McNamara said Catherine then began her building project and wrote to all her family and friends back in Iowa, which included the Eastmans and the Rogers, and talked them into coming south to Laurel to build either permanent homes or homes to escape the winters in Iowa. McNamara named the past and present owners of many of the homes that are still in the historic district of Laurel including the Rogers Green House.

The Rogers Green House belonged to Nina and Wallace Rogers, who were the parents of Lauren Rogers. Tragically Lauren died and they built the museum across the street in his memory. McNamara said most people don’t realize the impact Catherine had on education in the city. She was instrumental in establishing Oak Park.

McNamara said Catherine went down to the city hall to find out what they were spending on education in the black community. She found that although they were building beautiful buildings for them, they weren’t putting much into their education. She donated $10,000 of her own money toward their education and challenged the city and the black community to match her; they did.

“She hired only the best African American instructors from across the country to come to Oak Park,” said McNamara. “From that school, as you know, came army generals, surgeons, lawyers, opera singers, world-class athletes and pianists. She wanted to see us be better than we thought we could be. I hope that you know how lucky we are to have that history.”

“We didn’t even get into the other ladies like Alice Tracy Welch, who did the world class genealogy books, and she was a state regent from this chapter. I think you can see how our chapter has survived even in 2019 because of the leadership we’ve had through the years,” noted Nahoula Chapter President Cindy Rice.

McNamara gave the chapter the original transfer cards she found while serving as state registrar of Catherine Larison Marshal Gardiner, which states that Gardiner had been a member in good standing since November 5, 1896, and she was requesting a transfer of membership from the Chapter in Clinton, Iowa, to Nahoula Chapter in Laurel. She also had transfer cards for Nina Eastman Rogers, Mary Jeanette Gardiner Wisner, and Mrs. Frank Ghilchrist, who were all transferring into Nahoula Chapter in Laurel.