A Royalist, a Roundhead, and a Lodge in Warrington
England's earliest record of a man being made a Mason is a diary entry from October 1646 — written by a King's man received alongside a Parliamentary colonel.
Essays
From the Trestle Board
A new essay each Monday on the history of the Craft, the men who carried it, the work it has done in the world — and the story of our own city.
This Week
The Past Three Months
Recent Essays
Essays remain here for thirteen weeks, then rest until they come round again.
How Stonecutters Became Symbolists
No lodge ever voted to stop cutting stone. The change took a century, and the gentlemen who inherited the Craft kept the working tools on purpose.
Masonic History
8 min read
Kipling's Mother-Lodge
Entered by a Hindu, passed by a Muslim, raised by an Englishman, with an Indian Jew as Tiler — and he wrote about that room for the rest of his life.
Notable Masons
8 min read
The Fez and the Hospital
A lunch club founded in 1872 by a doctor and a stage comedian voted to tax itself into building children's hospitals. A century later they are still free.
Noble Deeds
8 min read
The Cornerstone Nobody Can Find
Washington laid the Capitol's cornerstone in a full Masonic ceremony in 1793. Three searches later, we still don't know exactly where it is.
Masonic History
7 min read
Five Points of the Star: Rob Morris and the Eastern Star
A Kentucky Grand Master laid up with an injured leg wrote a ritual around five women of Scripture — and answered the question every Mason's family asks.
Masonic History
8 min read
Nine Boys in Kansas City: The Masonic Youth Orders
DeMolay, Job's Daughters, and Rainbow were all founded within four years of each other — and in all three, the young people run the meeting.
Noble Deeds
8 min read
The Vice President and His Gardener
Theodore Roosevelt took his degrees in a lodge where his own gardener sat in the East. Franklin initiated two of his sons himself. Both said the same thing about why.
Notable Masons
7 min read
The Templars: What Is True, What Is Legend, What Is Ours
There is no documented line from the knights destroyed in 1312 to the Commandery — and the eighteenth-century men who invented one can be named.
Masonic History
9 min read
The Only President Who Was a Grand Master
Truman founded a lodge in 1911, spent five years as a District Lecturer when he was nobody, and was Grand Master of Missouri while sitting in the Senate.
Notable Masons
8 min read
Square, Level and Plumb in the Pouring Rain
The Grand Lodge of New York laid the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal on 5 August 1884 — and what that does, and does not, mean.
Masonic History
7 min read
Before the State: The Grand Lodge of Colorado, 1861
Three mining-camp lodges met at Golden City fifteen years before statehood — and thirty-two years later chartered Silver State No. 95.
Pueblo & Colorado
7 min read
The Lighthouse on Shuter's Hill
American Masons built a 333-foot memorial through the Great Depression without borrowing a dollar — because in 1871 a fire nearly took Washington's relics with it.
Masonic History
8 min read
Written for Anyone Who Asks
These essays are researched from primary and institutional sources, and every one ends with its references. Where the evidence is thin, we say so — and where a well-loved Masonic story turns out not to be true, we say that too.