Who Were the Seven Sisters and What Did They Do?

Camp Library, 1919 (Grand Rapids Public Library Samuel H. Ranck Collection 219)

​The Seven Sisters  

Providing Relief for the Troops!

​April 6th, 1917 America declared war on Germany and entered WWI. Almost immediately social service organizations began to mobilize to support American men sent to hastily constructed training camps at home, Camp Custer on the west side of the state for Michiganders, or immediately sent ahead to France. Seven organizations YMCA, YWCA, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the War Camp Community Service, and the American Library Association, known as the Seven Sisters, recruited volunteers to man the relief huts and collected donations of books, supplies, and money. 

The YWCA had just celebrated its 50th Anniversary in January 1917, but for the first time in nine years, the Flint chapter was asking for donations to cover operating costs. That problem changed quickly in April when donations and volunteers rushed to support the war effort. The YWCA began organizing women to complete important war work at homes such as child welfare duties, food conservation, scrap metal collection, and Red Cross work. The YWCA also provided housing for single women and girls who took enlisted men’s positions on the factory line to produce the machines of war. Finally, the YWCA began organizing women to send directly to the American Expeditionary Forces camps in St. Nazaire, France. In France, the volunteers provided basic first aid, operated communication switchboards, and ran the camp huts providing relief for troops at home and abroad.

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The seven sisters:

The YMCA, YWCA, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the War Camp Community Service, and the American Library Association

Learn more about other early service clubs in Flint and Genesee County.  

St. Nazaire, France  - WW1

WWI: American Expeditionary Forces, St. Nazaire, 1918. View of docks and harbor at St. Nazaire, Base Section No.1, St. Nazaire, France, May 31, 1918. U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. (2016/07/15)

The American Expeditionary Forces began arriving at the Naval Operating Base at St. Nazaire, France in June of 1917, almost as soon as the base began operation.

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Young Men Away from Home

Life in a WWI camp would be unimaginable to a soldier today. The standing army at the time was less than 100,000 and the National Guard was only slightly larger. There was no infrastructure to start training the suddenly millions of volunteers and conscripts pouring into small towns all over America. Many soldiers arrived to find that their first taste of army life was building their own barracks and draining swamps or pulling stumps to create usable land.

What soldiers were supposed to do with their downtime became a serious problem as there was nothing to keep them entertained. WWI trainees were lucky to have completed buildings, let alone electricity. Bored soldiers drink and drinking led to fighting. Fighting could lead to injury and/or death, reducing the effectiveness of the army. The soldiers would also spend their time with local sex workers, sometimes being removed from service entirely due to STIs (penicillin was discovered in 1928).    

The problem was so great that the Secretary of War, Lindsay Miller Garrison, appointed “ten nationally known men and women” to the ad hoc Library War Council in April when the ink on the declaration of war on Germany was still fresh. The purpose of the council was to campaign for donations. The goal was to raise 1 million dollars to finance the building of Camp Huts, usually under the oversight of the Knights of Columbus or the YMCA/YWCA, and fill them with furniture, books, and librarians when possible. In just under three months, the Library War Council was able to raise 5 million dollars with 10 million volumes donated. Flintstones turned out for the War Council the way they had turned out for YWCA with the book drive raising double of the target assigned to the booming industrial town.

The Knights of Columbus (K of C), along with the YMCA/YWCA oversaw the drive and fitting of the Camp Huts. Here is a cover of sheet music "The Hut of the K of C", for the play "What Next", 1918. Franklin, Arthur (composer), Goodman, Frank -- 1894-1958 (lyricist), Franklin, Lawrence -- active 1918 (composer). Courtesy of the Library of Congress. (click photo to go to link)

Book Drive Poster, WW1, American Library Association

Filling a Lonely Void

The Camp Huts would gain greater meaning in the lives of soldiers “over there.” In 1919, J. Bradford Pengelly traveled to Europe with the Flint YWCA where he volunteered in their Camp Huts and in the military hospitals dotting St. Nazaire for 10 months. The momentum of moving almost 5 million men across the Atlantic was hard to reverse, especially in 1918. The war ended in November, but AEF soldiers were staying in France well into the spring of the following year, mostly due to the logistics of returning millions of men and tons of equipment and animals back to the states.

For these American soldiers having the terror of the most brutal conflict in human history replaced by quiet boredom, punctuated by never-ending dreary winter rain and mud, led to a rash of suicides soon after the war. To make matters, and morale, worse, the Spanish Flu stalked the young and strong. Soldiers who had somehow managed to survive the Hun’s guns- were only to then be causually killed by a virus.

J. Bradford Pengelly, became the Rector of Flint's iconic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in September of 1913. An influential citizen, he was also an author, musician, orator, activist, businessman, civic leader, poet, and city planner.

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Camp Library, 1919 (Grand Rapids Public Library Samuel H. Ranck Collection 219)

Pengelly and others reported about  the morale boost provided by the Seven Sisters’ huts and the Flint YWCA for this now idle and frustrated army, and credited them with saving the sanity and ultimately the lives of many soldiers. In between the nearly constant stream of hot chocolate, donuts, and reading material, the huts held classes and schools to educate the soldiers returning home in hopes of helping them find meaningful work in the states. They became social centers where a lonely soldier might get a smile from an American YWCA volunteer or meet with fellow soldiers for board games or enjoy visiting performers and lecturers. Although the soldiers went home, the Seven Sisters became a permanent fixture in Paris in the American Library in Paris, the largest English lending library in Europe, still open today.

Contributed by
​Colleen A. Marquis

About Colleen:  She is an archivist at the University of Michigan-Flint, in the Francis Willson Thompson Library.  She is also a board member of the GCHS, serving as Archivist.