On Saturday, the Trumbull County Historical Society is offering a walking tour of Park Avenue in downtown Warren.

This tour, one of the most popular when we first offered it a few years ago, spans the streets from the Packard Apartments up to the Hughes Mansion, looking at some of the most fascinating blocks in downtown Warren. Although Mahoning Avenue gets a lot of credit as “Millionaire’s Row,” Park Avenue could certainly be dubbed the second Millionaire’s Row. Many children of the industrial and local manufacturing giants left Mahoning Avenue and made their own lasting legacy on Park.

In preparing for this tour, one of the buildings that we did a deep dive into was the YWCA, near the corner of Park Avenue and Monroe Street. The YWCA moved out of this building a few years ago, and while the building has changed a bit since it was first built, it is a staple in the Warren community.

This lot used to be the home of Charles Harrington. Charles was born in 1824 on a farm in Greene Township. He graduated from Oberlin College, became a lawyer, and built a career that led him to serve as president of Second National Bank in Warren — one of the largest and most prestigious companies of the day. That made him one of the largest and most prestigious men in Warren. He married a woman named Elvira, who was his first cousin, which was rather common at the time, and they had two children.

In the 1910s, Charles and Elvira decided to move to Washington Avenue, just a few blocks away, and purchased a home there that does still stand today. When they moved out of their Park Avenue house, the building sat vacant. At the same time, a local group had formed a committee to find a new home for Warren’s YWCA, and they selected this site on which to build the facility.

The YWCA was founded in Warren in 1915. In order to establish a YWCA charter at the time, 400 local women had to sign up. At their first banquet, 825 women had registered as charter members. They first met in very small rooms over the old Western Reserve Bank building.

By 1916, the city directory lists their location as 128 N. Park Ave., which would have been the Dana Musical Institute’s Junius College. It was located directly behind the Stone Block past High Street on Park Avenue. In 1919, they moved to Dana’s Martha Potter Hall, also within that same block of Park Avenue.

The original officers of the YWCA are listed as: Mrs. A.L. Phelps, president; Mrs. B.W. Edwards, first vice president; Mrs. Henry Stiles, second vice president; Mrs. Helen Hunt, corresponding secretary; Mrs. A. Clark, recording secretary; and Mrs. Dr. H.D. Warren, treasurer. Their list of trustees from 1915 also included Mrs. Lynn B. Dana of the Dana School of Music and Mrs. James Ward Packard.

In 1926, the YWCA saw a need for expansion. Under the leadership of Building Campaign Chair Benjamin Edwards (who also lived on Park Avenue in the Tudor revival mansion that once housed AAA), the YWCA solicited local donations to purchase the Harrington property and build a new facility. They broke ground in 1928, and the building was completed one year later in 1929. It housed travelers, served hot meals to downtown workers, offered education to newly arrived immigrants, and provided opportunities for social, spiritual and personal enrichment to young women.

The YWCA in Warren was founded before the YMCA, which is perhaps indicative of the strong social networks that existed in Warren for women at the time. The Warren Political Equality Club was one of the strongest in the region and would have been operating at its peak within this same time frame.

Even today, we see what has survived of these groups by looking at the Federation of Women’s Clubs, many of which were founded in the 1910s and 1920s. While many of these groups are seeing decreased membership, they show us how significant a role they played in women’s lives during a time when social, political, and perhaps even economic vitality, was on many women’s minds.