| Briarmont Improvement Club |
The Briarmont Improvement Club keeps the flower beds outside Town Hall, plays bridge most weeks, raises a scholarship each spring for a Hartwell County student bound for Oakridge College and runs a coat drive every winter. Cordelia Lathrop and other women started it in 1901, and its minutes go back to the first meeting. In 1918, the year the Institute opened, the club planted the Crenshaw Oak.
At the Founders Festival members run a bake table and check that the tribute names some of the town's women. They work the winter blood drive with Hartwell General Hospital, and deputies from the sheriff's department direct traffic at the club's spring plant sale.
Two or three members sit at the back of most council meetings with the agenda and a pencil. They seldom speak, and when one of them does, she has usually brought the minute book from the year the matter last came up. The club once spent three springs arguing for a bench at the harbor, and the bench went in where its first motion had asked for it.
Anyone in town can help. A work morning in the beds needs hands, the coat drive needs someone at the table, and the bridge game is often a fourth short. Nobody signs anything.
Out of character. Anyone can play a member of the club, and there is no Munibase group to join. Ask staff on Discord what the club has planned.