The Rosalind Club has one of the best origin stories in Orlando.
Imagine it’s February 15th, 1894. Twenty-three women walk into the Knights of Pythias Hall in downtown Orlando. They don’t have a clubhouse, a charter, or even a proper name yet. What they do have is a very good point: the men of Orlando have their lodges and their social halls, and the women have…nothing. That’s about to change.
The whole thing was cooked up by three friends: Mrs. Cecil G. Butt, Miss Belle Shephard (later Mrs. Edward Hauselt), and Miss Lucy Lawrence. Their pitch was beautifully straightforward. If the guys get clubs, we get a club. And just like that, the Ladies Social Club of Orlando was born.
Nobody in that room could have predicted what would happen next: a name change inspired by Shakespeare, a suffrage movement launched from the clubhouse floor, a city street renamed in their honor, and an institution that’s still throwing parties more than 130 years later. Welcome to the story of the Rosalind Club.
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The Name Game (Or: How Not to Name a Club)
Let’s be honest: “Ladies Social Club of Orlando” is fine, but it’s not exactly memorable. The members knew it, too. Within a year, they went looking for something with more personality and landed on Wimodaughsis, a word they invented by mashing together the first letters of “wives, mothers, daughters, sisters.” Points for creativity. Fewer points for pronounceability.
Thankfully, member Mrs. Anna Pell, a Shakespearean scholar with impeccable taste, had a better idea. She suggested Rosalind, after the witty, fearless heroine of As You Like It. Here’s the delicious part: in the play, Rosalind is the beloved of the character named Orlando. A women’s club, in a city called Orlando, named after Orlando’s sweetheart? That’s not just clever. That’s perfect.
A 1974 retrospective called it exactly that: Rosalind as “the sweetheart of Orlando,” tying together literature, the city’s name, and the spirit of the club in one elegant stroke. Wimodaughsis never stood a chance.
Luncheons, Yes. But Also: Launching a Suffrage Movement
The Rosalind Club’s first real home was at 37 North Orange Avenue, smack in the middle of downtown Orlando’s commercial district. The Neo-Classical Revival building went up in 1901, and the club moved in by 1903. It was a prime address, the kind of spot that said, “We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Now, you might picture a turn-of-the-century women’s club as a place for tea and gossip. And sure, there were luncheons. But the Rosalind Club had bigger plans.
Inside that very building, club members helped organize what historians now identify as Florida’s first suffrage league. The Federation of Women’s Clubs gathered in that very room and voted to establish the Florida Equal Suffrage Association, an organization dedicated to winning women the ballot statewide. Today, a suffrage marker outside 37 North Orange Avenue honors what those women set in motion.
The clubhouse’s run on Orange Avenue came to an end in 1920, when hotelier Joseph Fenner Ange rolled in with plans for his million-dollar Angebilt Hotel. The Rosalind Club packed up, the original building was demolished, and the hotel took its place. But honestly? The club had already outgrown the building. It had outgrown a lot of things.
A Room with a (Much Better) View
By 1916, the Rosalind Club had upgraded in a big way.
The club tapped Murry S. King, one of Orlando’s star architects, to design a brand-new clubhouse at 11 North Rosalind Avenue, right on the shore of Lake Eola. The timing wasn’t accidental. Orlando was in the thick of its “City Beautiful” era, and Lake Eola Park was fast becoming the city’s crown jewel. Putting a women’s club on its banks was a way of saying: this is where we belong, front and center.
The building itself was compact, about 6,373 square feet on roughly a third of an acre, but that lakefront real estate gave it the kind of presence that square footage alone can’t buy. More than a century later, it’s still there, holding court by the water.
But the best part of the story was still coming.
In 1919, Mayor Giles proposed renaming the street along the west side of Lake Eola. It had been going by the thoroughly uninspiring name of West Street. The new name? Rosalind Avenue. Just like that, a women’s club had written itself into the city map, literally. The club took its name from Shakespeare, and then handed that name to an entire street. That’s a power move.
Orlando’s Who’s Who (in Heels)
Want to know who ran early Orlando? Crack open the Rosalind Club’s 1926–1927 yearbook. The membership list reads like a cheat sheet to the city’s power structure: Beacham, Beardall, Blackman, Bumby, Cheney, Dolive, Duckworth, Giles, Guernsey, Holden, Ives, McCoy, O’Neal, Warlow, these are the families that built the businesses, filled the civic boards, and shaped the city. Library pioneer Olive Brumbaugh was in the mix, too.
The Rosalind Club wasn’t just where these women socialized. It was where they networked, strategized, and wielded the kind of quiet influence that doesn’t always make the history books but absolutely makes history.
By mid-century, the club had added another signature tradition to its roster: the debutante ball. A full-page spread in the Orlando Sentinel on January 1, 1962, covered the event held on December 30, 1961. Every debutante on the program had a family tie to the club, each one a daughter, granddaughter, or great-granddaughter of an existing member. Three generations deep. That’s not a social club; that’s a dynasty.
Still Standing (When Almost Nothing Else Is)
Here’s the thing about downtown Orlando: it reinvents itself constantly. Buildings go up, come down, get replaced. The skyline of 1916 is almost entirely gone. But the Rosalind Club’s lakefront clubhouse at 11 North Rosalind Avenue? Still there. Still looking good.
The city noticed. In 2021, Orlando began pursuing a conservation easement on the property, essentially a legal shield to protect the building’s historic character, preserve the surrounding plant life, and keep developers from bulldozing it for condos. According to the Orlando Business Journal, the easement would bind any future owner through at least 2034, with a possible extension.
The Rosalind Club isn’t widely listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but locally it’s treated as heritage. It shows up in the city’s preservation planning documents and gets name-dropped alongside every other Lake Eola landmark. The conservation easement strategy is classic Orlando pragmatism: don’t wait for a federal listing, just protect the thing.
The Rosalind Club at 130 Years and Counting
Swing by 11 North Rosalind Avenue on a Saturday and you might catch a wedding party posing on the steps. The building Murry S. King designed in 1916 is still very much in business, hosting weddings, receptions, luncheons, and celebrations of all kinds. It opens its doors to the wider community for events, but at its core, it remains what it’s been since that February afternoon in 1894: a private women’s social club.
Orlando Memory calls it the city’s oldest private social club for women. Local writers call it the area’s longest-standing institution of its kind. Members still show up for the same reason those original twenty-three women walked into the Knights of Pythias Hall: to be together, to celebrate, and, when the occasion demands it, to shake things up.
The city around it is almost unrecognizable from the Orlando of 1894. The Rosalind Club? It’s still right where they put it, doing exactly what it was built to do. And honestly, that might be the best part of the whole story.
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Sources:
https://orlandomemory.org/organizations/the-rosalind-club/ https://www.geocities.ws/krdvry/hikeplans/orlando_lake_eola/planorleola.html
https://expansive.com/a-century-in-the-making-orlandos-angebilt-building-commemorates-100th-anniversary/
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=139097
https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2024/05/10/orlando-lake-eola-rosalind-club.html
