There is a stone lighthouse on a hill in Alexandria, Virginia, more than three hundred feet tall, visible from the Potomac and from half of Washington. It was built by American Freemasons with their own money, during the Great Depression, without borrowing a dollar — and it was built mainly because of a fire.
The Fire
Alexandria–Washington Lodge No. 22 is the lodge in which George Washington held membership, and of which he served as Worshipful Master. It held what no other lodge on earth held: his Masonic possessions, his correspondence, objects from his household, the accumulated relics of the most consequential Mason in American history.
Since 1818 those relics had been kept in a museum room on the third floor of Alexandria's city hall, beside the lodge. In 1871 fire destroyed much of city hall and the courthouse. Most of the collection was, by good fortune, spared — and when a new city hall was finished in 1874, the lodge went back to renting rooms in it for its meetings and its relics.
Every Mason who thought about it understood the problem. Objects that belonged to the whole country had survived one fire by luck, and were sitting in a room that could burn again.
Twenty-Six Grand Lodges
On 22 February 1910 — Washington's birthday — Grand Master Joseph W. Eggleston of Virginia invited every Grand Master in the United States to Alexandria. Representatives of twenty-six Grand Lodges came, and there they formed the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Association, to build a fireproof memorial temple to Washington the Mason.
That is a genuinely unusual sentence. American Grand Lodges are sovereign and famously allergic to national projects — the same instinct that killed the wartime proposal to make Washington a national Grand Master and gutted the Baltimore Convention. The Memorial is the rare thing they all agreed to build together, and it remains supported by the Grand Lodges of the United States collectively.
A Lighthouse, Deliberately
The design took more than a decade to settle. The Association weighed a classical temple and a Gothic one, then in October 1921 commissioned the New York firm of Helmle & Corbett, and in February 1922 voted to approve its plans. What it approved was not a temple in the ordinary sense but a lighthouse — a tower after the great harbor lights of Greece and Rome. The architect's working model was a restoration drawing of the lighthouse at Ostia, Rome's port, but the building is almost always compared to the most famous of them, the Pharos of Alexandria, which stood at the harbor mouth of the other Alexandria and guided ships for centuries.
The pun is intended and the symbolism is not subtle. A lighthouse does not compel anyone. It stands still, keeps burning, and lets men steer by it — which is precisely the claim the Craft makes about moral example, and precisely the role it assigns to Washington.
The architect was Harvey Wiley Corbett, of Helmle & Corbett of New York. The building rises nine stories in stepped tiers to roughly 333 feet, and it sits atop Shuter's Hill — ground that local tradition says Thomas Jefferson once proposed for the United States Capitol, though no document supports the story.
Paid For, Stone by Stone
Ground was broken on 5 June 1922. The cornerstone was laid on 1 November 1923, with President Calvin Coolidge present, former President William Howard Taft — himself not a Mason, though his father and brothers were — and thousands of brethren. Washington's own 1793 trowel was used.
Then came the part that deserves the most respect.
The Association adopted an absolute rule: it would not borrow money. A contract was let only when the money to pay it was already in hand, and construction advanced only as fast as the funds came in. “There must never come a time,” its president told the 1923 convention, “when we have not the money on hand to fulfill that contract.”
Consider the calendar. The building went up between 1922 and 1932 — which means the second half of it was raised through the onset of the Great Depression, funded by contributions from Masons who were, in many cases, losing their farms and their jobs. They kept sending money, and the Association kept laying stone as it arrived.
It was dedicated on 12 May 1932, in Washington's bicentennial year, with President Herbert Hoover attending — built, as its historians put it, without an extended break in construction or the incursion of debt.
What stood on the hill that day, though, was a finished shell. Only the auditorium was complete; Memorial Hall was bare concrete and the tower had no windows. A month later the contractor, Cranford Paving Company, dissolved, and the Association had to take on the firm's debts related to the Memorial just as donations fell away with the deepening Depression. The interiors were finished room by room over the next four decades, as money allowed, and the last granite facing went on in 1973.
What Is Inside
The Memorial is a working museum, and the collection is extraordinary. Among the objects that survived the 1871 fire and are now safely housed there and at Alexandria–Washington Lodge:
- The trowel Washington used at the Capitol cornerstone on 18 September 1793 — still lent out for cornerstone ceremonies.
- The clock from Washington's bedchamber at Mount Vernon, whose hands were stopped by his physician at the moment of his death on 14 December 1799.
- Masonic aprons, jewels, and lodge furniture associated with him, including material connected to the apron sent from France.
- The lodge's own records, and a broad collection documenting American Freemasonry.
The building also houses a replica lodge room, exhibit halls for the appendant bodies, and an observation deck from which you can see the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the Potomac — the whole city Washington helped site.
Why It Is Worth Knowing About in Pueblo
Two reasons.
The first is practical: it is open to the public, it is a short walk from the King Street Metro, and any Colorado Mason with a day in Washington should go. Non-Masons are welcome; that is the entire point of a lighthouse.
The second is about how the Craft behaves when it decides something matters. Faced with a national obligation, American Masons did not lobby for a federal appropriation. They passed the hat among themselves for twenty-two years, refused to borrow, raised the tower in the middle of a depression, and kept at the inside for another forty years until it was done.
That is the same instinct that has a Pueblo lodge funding scholarships out of its own pocket, and the same instinct that built the Shriners hospitals. The Memorial is simply the largest and most visible thing it ever produced.