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Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders · The Lodge City
For a hundred years, Fort Wayne ran on lodge nights. The first secret society in the city was organized in 1823, inside the palisades of the old fort, a year before Allen County itself existed; by 1909 the Fort Wayne News could headline its lodge survey, without much fear of contradiction at home, "Fort Wayne's Secret Orders Are Largest and Richest in World." The boast was a newspaper's, but the substance under it was real: the Masons counted their members in the thousands and built two cathedrals and a ten-story temple; the Odd Fellows owned the most valuable lodge corner downtown; the Pythians, Red Men, Maccabees, Woodmen and a dozen smaller orders filled the city directory's "Secret and Benevolent Societies" pages with some seventy bodies in 1915. It is worth saying plainly what held this world together, because the record says it plainly: most of these orders were, beneath the grips and passwords, insurance companies and burial societies. They paid the sick benefit, buried the dead, and kept the widow's rent — that was the machine inside the mystery, and the men who joined knew it. This section holds the documented record of that world: who chartered what, when, where they met, how big it got, and what is left of it.
Wayne Lodge No. 25: the first secret society in Fort Wayne
1823 — present
A lodge older than the county: On March 22, 1823, John Sheets, Grand Master of Masons in Indiana, granted a dispensation to Alexander Ewing, John P. Hedges and Benjamin Cushman, and others, to form a lodge at Fort Wayne. Ewing…
The mother lodge's children, and the temples they built
1854 — 1926
Three more blue lodges: The revival of the 1850s filled the old lodge's hall and then overflowed it. Summit City Lodge No. 170 was resolved on at a meeting in Wayne Lodge's hall on May 11, 1854 — Colonel Charles Case in the chair…
The York Rite: Chapter, Council and Commandery
1851 — 1856
The degrees above the lodge: A Mason who wanted more ritual than the blue lodge's three degrees found it, in Fort Wayne, in three bodies chartered in the 1850s. Fort Wayne Chapter No. 19, Royal Arch Masons, was chartered May 24…
The Scottish Rite: the Valley of Fort Wayne and its cathedrals
1886 — present
The richest lodge in Fort Wayne: The Scottish Rite came to Fort Wayne trailing a small scandal that the order's own historians printed without embarrassment: in the early 1880s a body claiming Scottish Rite authority had…
Mizpah Shrine and the circus that outlived the lodge era
1909 — present
Fezzes, a million-dollar temple, and a circus: The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine — the Masons' self-styled playground, part parade, part hospital charity — had been tried in Fort Wayne once, about 1903…
The Eastern Star in brief
1880 — present
The Masonic family's open door: The Order of the Eastern Star, the Masonic auxiliary that admitted women alongside Masons, organized its first Fort Wayne chapter, Summit City Chapter No. 45, in 1880 — and surrendered its charter…
The Odd Fellows: sick benefits from 1844
1843 — present
Friendship, Love and Truth, with a cash box: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows reached Fort Wayne while Wayne Lodge was still digging out from the anti-Masonic collapse, and it prospered on the plainest of promises: join, pay…
The Knights of Pythias and their home on Washington Boulevard
by 1889 — 1915 and after
Four lodges and a drill corps: The Knights of Pythias, founded at Washington in 1864 on the Damon and Pythias story of friendship, planted in Fort Wayne the densest cluster of lodges of any order but the Masons. The 1891–92…
The Red Men: borrowed names, real benefits
by 1876 — 1915 and after
Tribes that were not tribes: The Improved Order of Red Men was, in the plain terms the record supports, a benefit society of white men that dressed its lodge machinery in borrowed Native dress — chiefs became "sachems," dues…
Elks, Eagles and Moose: the convivial layer
1890 — present
The lodge as clubhouse: The Private Clubs section tells the Elks' Fort Wayne story — Fort Wayne Lodge No. 155 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, instituted February 12, 1890, and builder of the Hillegas Road country…
The insurance orders: Woodmen, Maccabees, and the benefit machine
c. 1890 — 1920s
Life insurance with a ritual attached: Beneath the famous orders ran a second fraternal city, and the 1915 directory's societies pages are mostly its census. The Modern Woodmen of America kept two Fort Wayne camps — Camp No.…
B'nai B'rith, Hibernians, and the ethnic lodge layer
1864 — present
Lodges within communities: The Private Clubs section carries the B'nai B'rith lodge's outline — the organized social presence of Fort Wayne's Jewish community, meeting in the Bass Block — but the lodge's founding date is one of…
The Knights of Columbus: the Catholic order that kept growing
1899 — present
Thirty-six signatures: On October 15, 1899, thirty-six Fort Wayne men signed the charter of Knights of Columbus Council No. 451 — the first Knights of Columbus council in Fort Wayne and the second in Indiana, four months behind…
The Grand Army of the Republic: the veterans who ran the lodge city
1867 — c. 1936
The dominant order of the postwar city: The Grand Army of the Republic was a fraternity with one qualification no money could buy: an honorable Union discharge. Fort Wayne's GAR story begins almost with the order itself — the…
The successor orders: Spanish War veterans, the Legion, and the VFW
1898 — present
Each war its own lodge: The GAR's pattern — a war makes a brotherhood — repeated with every generation. The United Spanish War Veterans kept Zollinger Camp No. 36 in Fort Wayne in 1915, meeting at 1032 Calhoun Street, and the…
The numbers: how big the lodge city was
1843 — 1945
Counting the lodge city: The figures that survive are directory counts and the orders' own reports, and they are large enough to need no inflation. In 1909 the Fort Wayne News headlined its survey "Fort Wayne's Secret Orders Are…
The long contraction, and what still meets
1925 — present
What became of the lodge city: The contraction came order by order, and the record lets it be dated. The GAR went first, by definition: its last consolidated post's records run out in the later 1930s, and the library was writing…
