In the late 1880s, St. Petersburg was a sleepy pine scrub village striving to be cosmopolitan, and northern permanent and seasonal residents helped transform it by bringing culture and new ideas. During the early 1890s, City Park was unappealing, with tall grass, mud puddles, roaming livestock, and wild animals, until a group of women formed the Park Improvement Association in 1893 and began improving it. After raising money by selling ice cream, lemonade, candy, and other treats, they installed a fence in 1894 to keep out hogs, cows, and chickens, then funded a bandstand at the park's north end. Because St. Petersburg had no other performance areas, the bandstand became the center for concerts, community gatherings, political speeches, and winter tourist season entertainment, including bands such as Roy Smith's Royal Scotch Highlanders, and during World War I it also hosted mass meetings that stirred patriotic fervor. John and Sarah Williams, who came to the Pinellas Peninsula in 1875, had donated land for City Park from their homestead, and Sarah also worked with her husband to negotiate with Peter Demens to bring the Orange Belt Railway to St. Petersburg in 1888; naming the park and bandstand for the Williamses honored their importance to the city's growth. The bandstand remained in the same location for more than a century, though successive versions were built there or connected to it: the original in about 1894, an enlarged elevated version in the 1910s, a 1920 relocation to Waterfront Park that was destroyed in the October 1921 hurricane, a new concrete half-moon shell in 1920, a modern band shell in 1953, and a 1981 replica of the 1894 bandstand at Heritage Village. The Park Improvement Association evolved into the Woman's Town Improvement Association in 1901, and these women operated the park at a time when laws and customs denied women the right to vote or hold public office, until the city took over Williams Park's care and upkeep in 1910. In 1920, students at the city's Manual Training School built at least 200 benches for the park and at one point set a school record by assembling a bench in 8 minutes and 35 seconds.