Mayor proclaims Tuesday ‘Peggy Adams Day’

Mayor Gail Coniglio has proclaimed Tuesday as “Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League Day” in recognition of the shelter’s 90th birthday.

Operating continuously since 1925, the rescue league functions as a humane society that last year provided services to more than 28,000 dogs and cats. It is the largest private animal shelter in Palm Beach County.

Peggy Adams’ facilities at 3100/3200 N. Military Trail in West Palm Beach shelter hosts lost, homeless and unwanted animals. Besides finding adoptive homes for dogs and cats, the rescue league provides medical services and spays and neuters them to help keep local populations under control.

Peggy Adams “promotes the vision to create a community where 100 percent of the adoptable animals find loving homes and no animals will be euthanized because of pet overpopulation,” Coniglio wrote in her proclamation.

The rescue league has strong ties to the town. Many of its board members, donors and supporters live in Palm Beach.

In 1924, eight women met at the home of Amy Lyman Phillips in Palm Beach to decide what to do about the ongoing problem of animals left behind by winter visitors returning north. The rescue league emerged from that meeting and was incorporated a year later.

Its original shelter was a modest structure on the grounds of what is now the Palm Beach International Airport. Flattened by the hurricane of 1928, it was rebuilt with donated dollars and volunteer labor.

In 1989, Charles Norton Adams donated to start an endowment fund in memory of his wife, Peggy Adams, in return for a name change to the Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League from the Animal Rescue League.

The shelter has moved and expanded several times since its founding, most recently into a state-of-the-art clinic and adoption center named after Palm Beach residents Jane and Robert Grace.