Founded in San Francisco in 1893, Town and Country Club is the second oldest women’s club west of the Mississippi and fifth oldest in the nation. Called “a unique club for women” by The New York Sun that year, the object of the Club was to maintain a reading room and circulating library, where members from both town and country could gather for lectures, programs and other social events.

A loft at 23 Post Street served as the Club’s first official clubhouse for several years.  As plans to expand into new quarters were being made – the membership having outgrown the original premises – fate intervened to speed up the process.  The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 leveled the Post Street Building, reducing it to a heap of rubble and ashes.

In 1908, the Club was offered a classic Georgian red brick building that was to be erected on Stockton Street across from Union Square, this area having finally been cleared of the wreckage left by the earthquake and fire.  In 1909, the Town and Country Club moved into its new clubhouse at 218 Stockton Street, on the corner of Maiden Lane (then called Union Square Avenue), where it remains to this day.