Since 1906, the women of La Retama Club in Corpus Christi have worked to support public literacy and education in their city. For over one hundred years, their purpose of education and support of the Corpus Christi Library System remains unchanged.

LA RETAMA CLUB. La Retama Club is a women's club organized in May 1906 by members of the Woman's Monday Club of Corpus Christi after several of its members’ daughters requested an "adjunct" literary society for unmarried women to study and socialize. The club's name and colors, yellow and green, came from an indigenous yellow-flowering tree. The founding members included Margaret Lorine Jones, first president; her sister, Kathleen Jones; teacher Lillie Beard, first vice president; Ida Daimwood, second vice president; her sister Margaret Daimwood; Hallie Robertson, treasurer; Lucille Scott, secretary and daughter of founding Woman's Monday Club president, Ella (Dickinson) Scott; Alice Borden, daughter of Sidney G. Borden; Marion Merriman, granddaughter of Eli T. Merriman; Maud French, before her marriage to George Washington Cox; and other women from predominantly White, middle-class, and affluent families in the area. Mary Carroll, an active club woman who helped collect local history for the library archives, joined in the first year of the club's existence.

La Retama held its first meeting at the Jones family home on May 17, 1906, and joined the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs on November 21, 1906. The club limited membership to thirty-five women during its second year and often did not meet during summer months. After several members, including the first two presidents, Jones and Agenette "Nettie" White, and most of the group's charter officers had to resign because they married, the club voted to permit married women to be members of the organization. 

La Retama Club worked with the Monday Club on numerous civic beautification and other projects typical of the Progressive Era. They adopted the Monday Club’s goal of establishing a library for the public in Corpus Christi. They held fundraisers, purchased books and furniture, and collected donated books. La Retama Library, which filled one second-floor room of the Hatch and Robertson Building (later the Lovenskiold Building) at the corner of Peoples and Mesquite streets, opened to the public on May 3, 1909. In 1914 Marie Marguerite von Blücher, club member and granddaughter of Maria Augusta von Blücher and Anton Felix Hans Hellmuth von Blücher, served as the librarian, and the library was open on afternoons except on Sundays.

La Retama Club member volunteers maintained and staffed the library; however, they depended on local civic groups, private donors, and city government for funds to keep the doors open. In August 1916 the library closed temporarily due to water damage from a fire, then closed again after it was nearly destroyed in the 1919 hurricane (see HURRICANES). With donations from the American Red Cross, La Retama Library reopened at the State Hotel in September 1920; however, severe storm damage caused lingering economic hardship in Corpus Christi, and La Retama Club struggled to fund the library during the years that followed. Fiscally constrained, Mayor Perry Lovenskiold, a friend of the library, and the Corpus Christi city council denied La Retama’s request for aid in April 1922, so the club increased their fundraising events and eventually encouraged the city to take over the library.