On this day in New York · January 5, 1905
The Audubon Societies Become One, in New York
A scattered handful of bird-lovers' clubs, worn down by watching hat-makers shoot egrets to extinction, incorporated in New York as one outfit that's still running the fight today.
The facts
- Incorporated
- January 5, 1905, in New York State
- First president
- William Dutcher, previously chairman of the National Committee of Audubon Societies
- Earlier state societies folded in
- Massachusetts Audubon Society (1895) and Pennsylvania Audubon Society (1896)
- Original full name
- National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals
On January 5, 1905, the National Committee of Audubon Societies incorporated in New York State as the National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals. It brought together state-level groups that had formed on their own in the 1890s, Massachusetts in 1895, Pennsylvania in 1896, into a single national body with real money behind it and William Dutcher, the committee's longtime chairman, as its first president. The fight they were incorporating to win was over feathers: plume hunters were shooting herons and egrets by the thousands to supply a booming trade in decorated women's hats, and state laws alone weren't stopping it. The organization built in New York that January is, under a shorter name, the National Audubon Society you can still visit today.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Located in the United States and incorporated in 1905, Audubon is one of the oldest of such organizations in the world.
Wikipedia, on the 1905 incorporation of the National Association of Audubon Societies
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
That New York incorporation is why there's a single National Audubon Society at all, still headquartered in Manhattan, and it's the organizational root of the fight that eventually got plume hunting for hat feathers banned outright.
Sources
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