Anne Morgan’s active participation in fundraising and advocacy can be traced as early as to 1903, when she became a founding member and treasurer of the Colony Club, the first private social club for women in New York. To commemorate the significance of this moment, the club was also been chosen as the place to host the American Friends of Blérancourt’s 2018 and 2019 fall galas to celebrate its Anne Morgan Women of Courage Award and Château de Blérancourt Award.

1914 marks a year of change and challenge worldwide. Hearing the words “war is declared, war is declared” as they were shouted through the streets of Savoie, France, where Anne Morgan resided that summer, Morgan was faced with the reality of war and sought to actively participate in providing humanitarian aid.

By 1916, Anne Morgan was an active participant in many organizations that helped with the war efforts. While she served as the treasurer and board member of the the Civilian Division of the American Fund for the French Wounded, Morgan was also a member of the America Ice Flotilla Committee, which raised $70,000 in 1916 for equipping ambulances on the Western Front and $100,000 in 1917 for automobiles and ice-making machines for field hospitals.

After Blerancourt was liberated in 1917, the region was left with massive devastation. Morgan stepped in by rallying an additional three hundred fifty plus American women volunteers to work in coordination with the French government and the American Red Cross with building wooden barracks, reseeding 4,000 acres of land, restoring forty-seven houses, providing stoves for the residents and training local residents the trades.

On March 23, 1918, as the war progressed, Anne Morgan and Anne Murray Dike soon recognized that there should be direct focus on the civilian population and founded the American Committee for Devasted France, also known as the American Committee or by its French acronym CARD (Comite Americain pour les Regions Devastees).

Although Anne Morgan avoided her pictures shown in the press, she understood the power of photography. Photography became an essential tool in conveying to her American parts the humanitarian need with helping the French villages that were devastated after the war.

Between 1918 and 1922, she commissioned artists such as Harry B. Lachman, to present the urgent need to provide aid to the French civilians following the war. Through thousands of photographs and films, Lachman documented the relief efforts of Morgan and the CARD volunteers, which became essential media that propelled her fundraising campaigns America. Today, The American Friends of Blérancourt’s traveling exhibition American Women Rebuilding France 1917-1924 continues to honor these images by showcasing them.

In 1919, after years of revisiting France regularly, Anne Morgan bought the remains of the chateau at Blérancourt and set a home in one of the pavilions, which is now known as the Anne Morgan Pavilion.

By 1920, several community based programs were well developed in Blérancourt, France (Aisne, Picardy). Though CARD and American volunteers lead the programs, members of the local french community were trained to run the programs independently. Some of the few programs included: hiring professionally trained nurses, who paid visits to communities to treat malnourished children; reopening of the Goutte de lait in Soisson, a philanthropic institution that distributed pasteurized milk for infants; promoting physical education for children; and establishing free public libraries with open access to shelves and comfortable reading rooms for young readers.

While Anne Morgan was deeply devoted to the humanitarian aid to France during the early 1920s, she never lost sight of the ongoing work to improve the lives of self-supporting women in New York. On April 24, 1922, Morgan took part in an important meeting that formed the American Woman’s Association, Inc. (AWA), which goal would be to “uphold American ideals and the fundamental principles of American democracy…to stand for the highest type of American womanhood...to promote mutual improvement and social purposes of members.” The New York Times reported it as the “first act of non-political and non-sectarian organization to put up a big clubhouse for women.”

Beginning in 1924, Anne Morgan and Anne Murray Dike transformed the other pavilion at Blérancourt into a museum dedicated to French-American history, and founded Les Amis Français de Blerancourt, a group to help develop the museum expansion, renovation and its collections.

Though Anne Morgan was eventually elected president of AWA, her focus remained on doing humanitarian work so she eventually stepped down from her post in March 12, 1928.

Officially in 1930, like what she did for the humanitarian services and communities that she rebuilt in Picardy, Anne Morgan gave the chateau and the museum to the town in Blérancourt. It later became part of the Reunion des musees nationaux and became a French national museum and now known as the Franco-American Museum, Château de Blérancourt.

Under the suggestion of Pierre Rosenberg, the Chief Curator of Paintings at the Louvre Museum at the time, to raise funds for the expansion, the gardens and the new educational programs and technology of the Franco-American Museum, Château de Blérancourt, didi d’Anglejan and Eugénie Anglès founded The American Friends of Blérancourt (AFB) to work and motivate membership in the U.S.A. to expand and make known a unique museum that celebrates three centuries of French-American friendship.

A second round of major renovation and expansion project at the Museum was initiated

The American Friends of Blérancourt (AFB) fundraised over $2 million to support the second renovation project while presenting the American Women Rebuilding France 1917-1924 traveling exhibition as a way of sharing the historic photographs that were commissioned by Anne Morgan and has so far circulated dozens of museums, galleries and cultural centers in U.S. cities.

The Franco-American Museum at Blérancourt reopened on June 24, 2017 and housed new galleries and a new entrance hall and user-friendly education programs.

AFB embraced new era with the Anne Morgan Women of Courage Award and the Blérancourt Fellowship as new ways of supporting the Museum and the legacy of Anne Morgan.