Caroline Stokes Honored For A Longstanding Commitment To Keeping Newtown Beautiful

By Shannon Hicks

Garden Club of Newtown member Caroline Stokes got more than she bargained for when she signed up to take part in the club’s outing on June 26. The group had planned to meet in the morning and drive into Bridgewater to enjoy a special visit in a private garden, and then return to town for lunch at The Inn at Newtown.

What Mrs Stokes didn’t know was lunch included an additional agenda: To recognize the final original member of the club with a lifetime membership. The club’s members managed to keep the honor a secret from Mrs Stokes, even though a newsletter had been sent out to membership with a special insert reminding everyone of the upcoming celebration. Mrs Stokes’ copy of the newsletter had conveniently had the insert removed before it was mailed.

When she arrived at The Inn at Newtown on Tuesday afternoon, a room full of ladies greeted her, ready to celebrate her longstanding dedication to horticulture and conservation in Newtown.

The club was founded, current co-president Nancy Rowe said, approximately in 1955. Founding members were Adrian Greene, Helen Bruno, Libby Morse, and Hilda Walch. Mrs Stokes was the club’s first recording secretary, and the club was the first of its kind in Newtown. It was formed when the town’s ladies decided they no longer wanted or needed to travel into Danbury to fulfill their gardening-related interests.

At first, the club used to meet in the original meeting room of C.H. Booth Library.

“At the time, that was the best meeting place,” Mrs Stokes recalled. “Because of the size of the room, though, our membership was limited to 65 members. We had a waiting list of nearly four years then.”

Garden Club of Newtown has always been a civic-minded organization, Mrs Stokes said. One of the group’s first undertakings was the planting of hundreds of daffodils in the town’s bucolic Ram Pasture.

In December 1997, the garden club was one of three local organizations that donated enhancements to help complete the Reading Garden at Booth Library. In December 2000, the garden club joined The Connecticut Fund for the Environment, a non-profit organization founded in 1978 that is working to protect environmental quality across the state through better air and water quality, controlling toxic contamination, minimizing the impact of highways and traffic congestion, protecting public water supplies, and preserving open space and wetlands so crucial to citizens and wildlife.

“The appeal of something like this club,” said Kay Cochrane, an outgoing co-president of the club, “is that we are all interested in some form of gardening. Some like arranging, some want to know how and when to plant. We all have different interests.

“It’s also the idea of getting together with a nice group,” she added. “It’s a social group where we do learn a bit, too.”

“The garden club has always been my fun outlet,” Mrs Stokes said during her luncheon, where she was presented with a pin from Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut. A small circular piece depicts a large tree, with the words “The Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut” encircling the tree. A bar attached by a small chain has the words Life Member in capital letters on it.

Mrs Stokes was also given a gift from the club members, a gardening box filled with gloves and gardening instruments.

The club is currently a member of Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut and National Council of State Garden Clubs.

Joining a fledging garden club and maintaining membership is hardly the beginning of Mrs Stokes’ involvement in Newtown. Mrs Stokes was also one of the five women who were instrumental in establishing the local chapter of Newtown League of Women Voters in March 1948. Like her garden club counterparts, Mrs Stokes and the other ladies who formed the Newtown LWV chapter, Connie Harrison, Carol Wilde, Julie Howson, and Mary Jackson, had tired of traveling to Danbury for meetings and decided to form an organization of their own.

(The Newtown LWV disbanded after 50 years in service, officially calling it a day in April 1999.)

She is also a former third grade teacher for Hawley School, where she taught for 12 years. Prior to that she was a substitute teacher.

Mrs Stokes additionally serves as curator of collections at C.H. Booth Library in Newtown. A few years ago it was Mrs Stokes who unearthed an old notebook of Sarah Booth’s in the library’s vault, which eventually led to the creation and publication of The Sarah Booth Cookbook. Sarah, the grandmother of Newtown benefactress Mary Elizabeth Hawley, was married to Dr Cyrenius H. Booth, the namesake of Newtown’s library.

Caroline Stokes additionally has been a member of The Mayflower Society/Colonial Dames of the 17th Century, Connecticut Society of Genealogists, was a member of the board of directors at Booth Library, has been on the board of trustees at Newtown Meeting House, and was active for 25 years in Christian education at Newtown Congregational Church.

In 1994, she and her husband Bob were Grand Marshals for Newtown’s Labor Day Parade.

The Stokeses came to Newtown in 1946, when they were first married. They rented for 18 months in the Riverside area, then bought the house they have lived in for over 50 years and raised two children.

 “Newtown is a wonderful community,” Mrs Stokes told The Bee in March 1999. “I believe in cultivating a community spirit. I see a lot of good volunteer work here, and I hope new people will continue to volunteer.” Newcomers and longtime residents could do worse than to look at the example set by Caroline Stokes.