For more than 135 years, the Vincennes Fortnightly Club has served as a cornerstone of women’s civic engagement in Knox County. Founded in 1890 by three women who loved Shakespeare: Ida Lusk, Clare DeWolfe, and Alice Clarke, the Club grew from an informal reading circle nicknamed “the Triangle” into one of Indiana’s most enduring women’s organizations. Now, as the Knox County Community Learning Kitchen approaches its third year of operation inside the Fortnightly’s historic clubhouse, a new generation is discovering what the Club’s founders understood more than a century ago: that a kitchen can be a powerful instrument of community.
The Fortnightly Club was born in an era when women had no vote and few avenues for public influence. Before women’s suffrage arrived in Indiana in 1917 and nationally in 1920, organizations like the Fortnightly were among the only accepted channels through which women could advocate for social reform in housing, education, and healthcare. Indiana was at the forefront of this movement: the Minerva Club in New Harmony, established in 1859, was among the earliest women’s clubs in the nation, and by the peak membership years of 1915 to 1925, clubs like the Fortnightly were engines of civic progress. The Vincennes Fortnightly joined the Indiana State Federation of Women’s Clubs to unite women in the cause of social betterment, and its members championed causes that reshaped the city: a Parent-Teacher Association, a Civic Music Association, a Business and Professional Women’s Club, and most notably, a Carnegie Library, which was dedicated in 1919 after years of effort led by founding member Ida Lusk.
The Club’s ambitions were also expressed in brick and mortar. In 1915, members purchased a private residence as their clubhouse. When they outgrew the space, a fundraising campaign led to the construction of a purpose-built clubhouse at 421 North Sixth Street, designed by Sutton and Routt and dedicated on September 25, 1928. The French Renaissance Revival building featured a reception room, meeting room, a 420-seat auditorium, and a kitchen capable of serving 150. Many say the original Fortnightly women “cooked through their mortgage,” paying off the building by hosting dinners and events that drew the whole community through the clubhouse doors. Food was not merely sustenance, but a strategic move to keep the Club solvent and the community fed.
In 2007, a pivotal moment in the Club’s history arrived when its members gifted the building to the Knox County Public Library. Since the transfer, the building has hosted tens of thousands of visits from Knox County Council meetings and book signings to wedding receptions, cooking classes, and historical reenactments. A historical marker was placed on the front lawn in 2010, and the library board has invested significantly in restoring and maintaining the structure. Through it all, the Fortnightly Club has continued to meet in the building several times a year, maintaining its living connection to the space it built nearly a century ago.
Today, the spirit of those founding women lives on in the Knox County Community Learning Kitchen. Now approaching its third year of operation, the CLK has become one of the most dynamic programs in Knox County, teaching residents how to eat well and cook with simple, affordable ingredients, many of them sourced locally from the Vincennes Historic Farmer’s Market and area growers. Under the guidance of Ambassador of Wellness Tiffany Muranaka, the program has reached thousands of Knox County residents, from toddlers to seniors, through hands-on cooking demonstrations, nutrition education, and community events. In its first year alone, the CLK reached nearly 6,000 individuals in person: 57 percent of whom receive SNAP
benefits, while its social media presence extended that reach to tens of thousands more. The program has built partnerships with more than 30 community organizations, including local school systems, food banks, health systems, Purdue University Extension, Vincennes University, recovery organizations and more each day.
Now the CLK is poised for its most significant chapter yet. The Friends of the Knox County Public Library has committed to upgrading the Fortnightly’s kitchen with plans to install a new oven, replace the sinks, and reconfigure cabinetry to create more usable workspace for classes and demonstrations. The renovated kitchen will give a respectful nod to the building’s past while bringing the facility into full compliance with Indiana food safety requirements to ensure that the CLK can continue to grow and serve more Knox County residents than ever before.
There is a satisfying symmetry in all of this. More than a century ago, a group of determined women used a kitchen to build a clubhouse, feed a community, and pay off a mortgage. They cooked their way to independence and civic influence at a time when few other paths were open to them. Even the CLK’s logo pays tribute to that origin story: the triangle of those three original Fortnightly founders has been reimagined as a carrot, a symbol of the healthy eating education now taking place in the same building where the Club began. Today, with the Fortnightly Club still gathering in its historic home and the Community Learning Kitchen filling that space with the sounds and smells of neighbors learning to cook together, the past and the future share the same address. The original Fortnightly women would recognize the pride in community that fills their clubhouse in 2026. They might even say it smells like home