Masonic lodge closing: Chester loses one more icon
Dwindling membership means end of an era for Masonic Temple in Chester
CHESTER >> Chester is about to lose one more link to its historic past.
December 2018 will bring a close to one of the city’s last standing ties to its mid-20th century economic and population peak when Chester Lodge #236 Free and Accepted Masons will surrender its charter, merge its members into Penn Lodge #709 in Concord Township, and hang a “for sale” sign on its temple at Ninth and Welsh streets.
The masonic temple is the last fully operational building of the large fraternal and business structures that covered the northwest corner of the city’s downtown. The temple faces the boarded structure that once housed the Chester chapter of the Knights of Columbus, and to its southwest sit the vacant, partially occupied or empty lots of the Chester/Delaware County Daily Times, printer John Spencer Inc., the Order of Owls hall and the Odd Fellows Temple.
“I will definitely miss this lodge room and this building,” said Chester Lodge Worshipful Master Joe Walls. “When I got my First Degree (a stage of masonic initiation), I spent more time looking around the room than listening to what the guy was saying to me. I was thinking ‘holy cow, look at this place.’”
“I’m heartbroken that the history of the lodge is coming to an end,” said Robert Parkinson, the oldest living past member of Lodge 236, by phone from Florida. “You do the math – it’s a long time.”
The temple has been home to Lodge 236 for 97 of its 169 years (with direct ties to a previous lodge extending its history to 1796), built in 1921 at a cost of $498,000 (approximately
$7,150,000 in 2018 dollars, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
The building houses marble staircases, its original cable elevator, two lodge rooms (for official masonic meetings), meeting rooms that once hosted outside civic organizations, an auditorium and accompanying balcony that welcomed community entertainment productions, all featuring ornate paint-, wood- and metalwork that befit Chester’s status as a city on the rise when it was constructed.
Lodge 236 has suffered from the decline in membership that has struck fraternal and civic organizations in recent decades. The estimated $20,000 a year cost of maintaining the building has become unsustainable for the current membership, which lodge Secretary and Past Master Steve Beddow estimates to be around
190. About 50 of those are 50-year members, who are exempt from paying dues.
When the Daily Times reported on the lodge’s 100th anniversary ceremony in 1949, an estimated
450 brothers were in attendance (including representatives from
11 other lodges), with the Times listing only 15 50-year members’ names being recognized at the opening of the meeting.
“It’s not only the Masons – it’s the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Moose, the Knights of Columbus,” said Parkinson. “All these fraternal groups … they’re all starting to fade away,” he said, questioning what organizations would pick up the philanthropic work that the groups perform for their local communities and nationally.
Along with the publicly visible work Masonic appendant bodies perform for charity, such as the Shriners’ support for children’s hospitals and the Tall Cedars of Lebanon’s fundraising for muscular dystrophy, Masons’ aid for brothers and their families in need is a hallmark of the organization.
“They’ve reached over $9,000 this year alone for the MPS Society, and they’re still going,” Walls said of local lodges’ support for mucopolysaccharidosis research, prompted by a brother’s daughter having the metabolic disorder. Walls also mentioned a recent fundraiser for a Local 236 brother who suffered a severe work-related injury.
“When I had a stroke in 2015, the guys really came together for me,” said Oscar Stevenson, a Chester Lodge member and past Grand Tall Cedar of the Tall Cedars of Lebanon Penn Forest No. 21, by phone. “My wife can tell you, the guys called her and told whatever she needs – call them, let them know and it will happen.”
Walls and Beddow both noted the challenge of not only overall declining membership, but finding members willing to take on officer roles. Traditionally masters of the lodge held only one yearlong term, but Chester Lodge and others now have masters serving multiple terms.
Both attributed the challenges of learning masonic “work,” or ritual, and reciting thousands of words from memory to finding a capacity for learning, public speaking and leadership they did not know they had.
“I guess the best way to describe the masons is ‘men make men better,’” said Stevenson. “I don’t think the young people want to get involved anymore; too much other stuff to do and they don’t make the time for it – we made the time for it.”
The history of Chester Lodge parallels many of the national trends in fraternal organizations, and provides its city with one of the last ties to the early Republic period.
The Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania holds a disputed claim to being the oldest grand lodge in North America (thereby the third oldest in the world), tracing its establishment to 1731.
The then-Borough of Chester was first officially recognized in masonry when nine masons petitioned to form a lodge there. Chester Lodge #69 was granted a warrant (charter) from the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania on June
24, 1796. It met for the first time on Aug. 30 that year in a building at Fourth and Market (today Avenue of the States) streets, on the same block as the city’s last vestige of its early history, the 1724 Courthouse.
The lodge counted 186 masons in its membership over its
42-year history, during which time the borough population did not exceed 1,000. Its prosperity was ended by anti-Masonic sentiment that grew in the United States during the 1820s-’30s. At the time of Joseph Ritner being elected Pennsylvania governor on the Anti-Masonic Party ticket in
1835, lodge membership dwindled to six. Its warrant was finally recalled in 1838.
With the passing of anti-Masonic sentiment, the Delaware County Republican wrote in 1847 that “The Brethren of Lodge No.
69… meet to day (sic) at the residence of Mrs. Jane Irwin for the purpose of applying for a new charter.”
The Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania did not grant a request for the reinstatement of Lodge 69, instead granting a warrant for Chester Lodge #236 on Dec. 4,
1848. The new lodge was installed at a meeting on Feb. 23, 1849.
First meeting at the Penn Building at Third and Market streets, the lodge then constructed a new Lodge Hall at Broad (today East Ninth Street) and Madison streets in the mid-1850s. It then purchased Lincoln Hall at Fourth and Market streets in 1875. The lodge would remain there until the construction of the current building, funded through a corporation formed by the Tall Cedars of Lebanon (with Oscar Stevenson’s great grandfather listed on the charter bequeathing the building to Chester Lodge).
Historians call the late 19th and early 20th century the “golden age of fraternalism” in the United States, with an estimated peak of 40 percent of adult males belonging to one or more of the dozens of organizations existing at that time. Organizations provided welfare programs, life insurance and other benefits to members and their families that in the mid-20th century would be supplanted by government, insurance companies and banks opening service to the working and middle classes.
As the golden age of fraternalism waned, the growth of Chester Lodge and Lucius H. Scott Lodge #352 (which would grow out of Chester Lodge in 1864-65 and would merge back in the late 20th century, sharing the same buildings) that led to the building of the temple at Ninth and Welsh streets continued with the city’s industrial growth.
Penn Lodge, which Chester Lodge will now merge with, was founded by masons who had settled in Chester during and after World War I for work in the booming wartime industries.
“A lot of guys from the war would come back and join a fraternity because they wanted that fraternalism (they had experienced in the service),” said Beddow. “One lodge was Scott Paper guys; they would join that lodge because they knew one another from work. (The other) was the Sun Ship guys.”
The fraternity provided an egalitarian space for residents of all social standing, and forbade discussing politics and religion.
“When you walk through the doors, there were no Republicans, there were no Democrats, there were no bosses, there were no labors,” said Parkinson. “Everyone was equal in the lodge room, and that was really special.”