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 Largest and Richest in World" — a hometown boast, carried here as a headline and not a finding. Under it stood countable things. The Scottish Rite's Lodge of Perfection reported 695 members in 1905 and 1,025 in 1909, and the consistory stood near 1,100 at the cathedral dedication that November. The Odd Fellows' Fort Wayne Lodge No. 14 was valued at $125,000 in the same survey, on the most valuable lodge-owned corner in the city. R. L. Polk's 1915 directory — a commercial census, not a lodge publication — devotes its "Secret and Benevolent Societies" section to some seventy listings by this history's count: fourteen Masonic bodies, ten Odd Fellow bodies, four Pythian bodies, the GAR posts and their auxiliaries, and forty-odd councils, camps, tents, hives, courts and aeries besides. Wayne Lodge itself, before its 1833 suspension, counted fifty-four members in a settlement of a few hundred souls. And the National Register's historians, working from the temple's own records, put the combined membership of the lodges in the East Washington temple at over 10,000 during the Second World War, in a city of about 120,000. Even discounted for the men who held cards in three orders at once — and the directories' officer lists show the same surnames recurring from hall to hall — the lodge was the normal condition of adult male Fort Wayne for two generations.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne News, "Eighty-Six Years of Lodge History" (1909) — the headline; Lodge of Perfection membership; Odd Fellows' valuation.
2. Kansas City Kansas Republic, December 2, 1909 — the consistory near 1,100.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city directory, 1915 — the societies census, counted from the section's listings.
4. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Masonic Temple, Fort Wayne (1991) — the wartime temple membership and city population.
5. Roster of the Masonic Bodies in Allen County (1898) — Wayne Lodge's fifty-four members before 1833.