BeeLines - August 29, 2018
By Marybelle Beigh, Westfield Town & Village Historian
Jennie Macomber? She picked up the pieces and put it back together again!
It’s always a lot of fun when the phone rings and it is another faithful reader with another “tasty tidbit” of information, or another history mystery question. So, it was yet again when the lady on the other end of that mysterious electronic contraption wondered if your Westfield Historian knew that Jennie Macomber was the first secretary of the newly founded Westfield chapter of Young Women’s Christian Association – aka YWCA! That would have been around the turn of the PREVIOUS century.
Well, “No!” I had no idea about Jennie Macomber’s life, and was not sure whether the library had any ephemera or historic information about Miss Macomber in their files. So, I would LOVE to receive anything for Westfield’s History Archives. The caller said it might be several days before she could gather the information from the minutes of early YWCA meetings, as she was up to her elbows in tomatoes from her garden, and was putting by a batch of tomato sauce to enjoy this winter. YUMMY!
And as is so often the case in the historian office, research on one topic is only semi-productive, while invariably something totally unrelated shows up for another topic! While searching for historic maps and photos, what should I find but (NO, not a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer) not one, but TWO photos of Miss Jenny Macomber. And lo, and behold, one of them was of Miss Macomber at her secretary desk at the YWCA.
So, after attempting to make the photos into something reasonably publishable, it was off to the library to see what they had about Miss Jennie Macomber and the early YWCA. In fact, there are quite a number of articles about the beginnings and history of our local YW, probably because the YWCA, in 1909, had obtained the homey building on South Portage that had originally housed the Patterson Library while the current library was being constructed. But sadly, there is little about the life of Jennie.
According to her obituary in the October 4, 1933, Westfield Republican, “Miss Jennie Macomber, a former resident of this village, and highly respected, entered into rest at the Home for Aged Women in Fredonia where she had resided for the past ten years, on September 27, 1933, aged 82 years… She was born in this village and spent most of her life here. She was a member of the first graduating glass of the Westfield Academy and Union School, also a graduate of Vassar College, and the first secretary of the local Y.W.C.A. She was a member of the Presbyterian church of this village. She is survived by a half-sister, Mrs. Walter Hunt…burial in the family lot in Westfield cemetery.
Among the files about the history of the Y.W.C.A. were several references to Miss Macomber’s being the first secretary of the local YW. One of the articles went into more detail about the early years of the Y.W.C.A., explaining that there were about 34 members, and they were being provided with a variety of classes, Bible study, dance lessons, and other activities when suddenly one of the officers/teachers left town, and almost immediately afterward, the YW president took seriously ill and it looked like the organization was about to close. Then “Jennie Macomber jumped in and reorganized the entire group,” attracting more teachers and interesting activities.
Apparently, Miss Macomber was particularly talented in organizational and secretarial skills, and attracted the attention of Dr. Charles Welch. Dr. Welch, with Jennie Macomber, drew in several more active business and civic-minded Christian women and men, organizing the County Y.W.C.A. to provide impetus and connections. In fact, Dr. Welch also developed a Health Camp that met at Westfield Village’s Ottaway Park, later becoming a large organization as Camp Chedwel on Chautauqua Lake, all under the auspices of the YWCA. Eventually the camp moved to Bear Lake and became the YW Camp-in-the-Woods which served both boys and girls for several decades.
As an aside, my late mother, Frances Dibble Blackburn Anderson, went to camp there as did yours truly, and perhaps many of you readers have happy memories from those days. Another note of interest – Chedwel is a made-up name using the first two or three letters of Dr. CHarles EDgar WELch!