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 dues, and the lodge would pay you in sickness and bury you in death. Fort Wayne Lodge No. 14 took its charter on October 14, 1843, and was instituted on October 27 by Deputy Grand Master John Green; James P. Munson was its first Noble Grand. On April 22, 1844, the lodge paid its first sick benefits — the date that explains the whole institution. Harmony Lodge No. 19 followed on January 21, 1845 (the city directories of the 1870s date its institution January 31, and both dates stand in print), and Summit Encampment No. 16, the order's higher branch, was chartered July 10, 1845 — though the 1860–61 directory dates the encampment's institution to November 1849, a second conflict the lodge histories never reconciled. Concordia Lodge No. 228, organized May 31, 1862, served the city's German membership, as its name advertised.

The Odd Fellows built as they grew. Their halls anchor the early directories — the Odd Fellows' Hall on Calhoun between Main and Columbia in 1860, the hall over the post office in the 1870s, Harmony Hall on West Berry by the century's turn (at 111 West Berry by 1923, valued in 1909 at $50,000). In 1896 Fort Wayne Lodge No. 14 bought the ground at Calhoun and Wayne and built the Odd Fellows building there — the 1909 lodge survey called the corner the most valuable owned by any lodge in the city, and put the lodge's worth at $125,000. The order's women's branch, the Daughters of Rebekah, appears in the directories from 1876 (Deborah Lodge No. 110), and by 1915 the Odd Fellow family in Fort Wayne counted ten listings in the directory: three subordinate lodges, two encampments, a Patriarchs Militant canton, three Rebekah lodges and Our Home Lodge No. 881 besides. When the Grand Army of the Republic organized its first Fort Wayne post in 1867, it met in the Odd Fellows' hall on Calhoun Street — the lodge rooms were the city's public infrastructure before the city built its own. Harmony Lodge No. 19 survives into the present record: federal exempt-organization files still list it, now on West Jefferson Boulevard, with housing for the aged among its chartered activities.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne News, "Eighty-Six Years of Lodge History" (1909) — No. 14's charter and institution, first sick benefits, Harmony No. 19, Summit Encampment, Concordia No. 228, the 1896 building and the lodge's worth.
2. R. L. Polk & Co. and Edmondson's Fort Wayne city directories, 1860–61, 1876–77, 1878, 1879–80, 1915, 1923 — halls, the January 31 dating of Harmony Lodge, the 1849 encampment dating, the Rebekah lodges, the ten listings of 1915.
3. Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, May 1, 1867, as summarized in the Sons of Union Veterans' Indiana GAR post history — the first GAR post in the Odd Fellows' hall.
4. Internal Revenue Service exempt-organization records for Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Harmony Lodge No. 19, Fort Wayne.