Rotary Club of El Paso

Since the birth of the Rotary Club of El Paso in 1914, only nine years after Paul Harris founded the first Rotary Club in Chicago, we have seen major changes come, both to our club and to our sunny spot on the Rio Grande.

In that year our town was already an important mercantile hub with railroads stretching east, west, and north in the United States and south into Mexico. With Fort Bliss, she was a strategic military center. With Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico as a dependable source of irrigation water, she was soon to enjoy national economic importance as an agricultural center.

In that context, our sixty-one founding members were public-spirited visionaries. Business and professional men of various commitments, recognized from the start that as El Paso increased in size – that year it numbered 60,000 – it could become not only a place to grow rich; under their guidance, it could become a community of healthy, civilized human beings eager for the cultivation and refinement that civic enterprise could encourage.

As the founders of our club – Number 119 on the national roster – dedicated themselves to that dream, they incidentally created for us a heritage that defines us a hundred and six years later.

Numbering some 115 members in 2024-25, we men and women make our weekly meetings an opportunity to encourage new ideas for the well-being of the El Paso community. As we ponder the good and sometimes controversial ideas brought to us by our guest speakers, we plan and form projects we staff to implement those schemes.

We are not merely joiners. As El Paso neighbors-at-large, we enjoy the friendships we make in our club activities. Just as importantly, we relish the improvements that we, as teams, can bring to this great city, now numbering over 830,590 people, that we are pleased to call home.

On that basis, we are constantly adding new members, people of stature in their organizations, and enterprises. It is through dedicated, energetic people like these that we firmly intend to maintain the historic goals of our founders.