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 — took its dispensation on May 31, and held its first meeting under charter on June 8, 1855, with Case as its first master; the young Sion S. Bass, seven years from his death at Shiloh, sat among its first officers. Sol D. Bayless Lodge No. 359 was organized on May 4, 1866, and opened under its charter on June 4, named for the merchant Mason who had presided at Summit City's organization. Home Lodge No. 342 received its dispensation on July 17, 1868, though its charter was not issued until May 24, 1870. Those four lodges — Wayne, Summit City, Bayless and Home — were still the city's whole blue-lodge roster when the 1915 and 1918 directories were printed, each keeping its own night of the week in the Masonic Temple: Bayless on Mondays, Home on Tuesdays, Wayne on Thursdays, Summit City on Fridays.

Their homes mark the order's fortunes. After the 1831 brick temple was sold, the lodges rented rooms for half a century — Riser's building, the MacDougal block, the Seidel block. In 1886 the Masonic bodies moved together into a purpose-built Masonic Temple at the northeast corner of Clinton and Wayne streets, the downtown corner the directories list for the next four decades. That temple burned on February 10, 1923, taking the Temple Theatre with it. The answer was the building that still defines the fraternity in Fort Wayne: the Masonic Temple at 216 East Washington Boulevard, Charles R. Weatherhogg architect, its cornerstone laid in 1923 and the building dedicated June 22, 1926 — a limestone tower of Corinthian, Ionic, Egyptian and Colonial lodge rooms and ballrooms, placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. During the Second World War, the National Register nomination records, the lodges occupying that temple counted more than 10,000 members between them, in a city of about 120,000 people. The building's architecture is treated in the Architecture section; what belongs here is the scale: at the fraternity's high-water mark, roughly one Fort Wayne man in twelve belonged to a lodge in that one building.

Sources:

1. Roster of the Masonic Bodies in Allen County, Indiana (1898) — Summit City, Bayless and Home lodge organizations and charter members.
2. Fort Wayne News, "Eighty-Six Years of Lodge History" (1909) — the revival lodges, the 1886 temple's first occupancy.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city directories, 1915 and 1918 — the four lodges' meeting nights in the temple.
4. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Masonic Temple, Fort Wayne (1991) — cornerstone 1923, the Second World War membership figure; marker record, Historical Marker Database — dedicated June 22, 1926.
5. Allen County Public Library photo record of the February 10, 1923 fire, as carried in the Theaters section of this history.