Three 1856 Window Sashes Are Fixed. The Bathroom Is Next.

<p>An 1856 window sash is a fussy, unglamorous thing to save. It is wood and wavy glass and a century and a half of paint, and the honest answer is that a modern replacement would be cheaper, tighter and warmer. Three of them have just been restored anyway, on a house on East College Street, because some things are worth more than their thermal performance.</p>

<p>The Woman's Club of Murfreesboro holds its Summer Garden Party on Saturday, August 29, from 5 to 8 p.m., at the home of Ronnie and Donna Barrett at 1750 Twelve Oaks Lane. It is the club's signature fundraiser, and the proceeds go into the Baskette House — the 1856 property the organization has owned, maintained and worried over since 1916. RSVPs are required and go to womansclubmboro@outlook.com.</p>

<h2>It started as a reading club</h2>

<p>The organization traces its roots to 1887 and the Helen Hunt Jackson Reading Club — a group of Murfreesboro women who got together over books at a time when that was a mildly radical use of an afternoon. What they built next was not a book group. They established the city's first permanent lending library.</p>

<p>Consider what that means in practical terms. Before there was a public library in Murfreesboro, there was a room these women stocked and staffed. And it did not stop at books. In the decades that followed, the club provided space for Rutherford County's first nurse — this in an era before the county had a hospital at all. The nearly 140-year record is a fairly astonishing list of civic infrastructure that existed because a private club decided it should.</p>

<p>That is the part people miss about organizations like this one. In a young county, the volunteer club was frequently the only institution standing between a community and simply not having the thing.</p>

<h2>What the money has already done</h2>

<p>Restoration work on the Baskette House is well underway rather than aspirational. The building has been fully rewired — a sentence that sounds small and is not, in a structure built five years before the Civil War, where every run of cable is a negotiation with plaster and hand-cut framing. Plumbing has been updated. The tenant space has been refurbished. And three original 1856 window sashes have been brought back rather than swapped out.</p>

<p>The list ahead is less romantic and more necessary: additional plumbing, structural support improvements, and a handicapped-accessible bathroom. That last item is the one that decides whether a 170-year-old building stays useful to everybody or quietly becomes a place only some people can attend an event in. Accessibility is what keeps a historic building a working building instead of a display case.</p>

<h2>Going</h2>

<p>The party is chaired by Susan Quesenberry, the club's president for 2026 through 2028, and Aurelia Holden, who held the office from 2024 to 2026. Five to eight on Saturday evening, on a lawn in late August, which in Middle Tennessee means the heat finally lets go somewhere around the second hour.</p>

<p>Murfreesboro is not short on old buildings; it is short on old buildings somebody is actively paying to keep. If you want more of the county's history in person, the <a href=”https://murfreesboro.com/stones-river-national-battlefield-living-history-september-12-2026/”>living-history program at Stones River National Battlefield on September 12</a> is free and two weeks behind this one.</p>