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 was a Revolutionary officer turned tavern-keeper at Barr and Columbia; John Tipton, the Indian agent and future United States senator, was the moving spirit in the rooms. The lodge first met inside the palisades of the recently abandoned fort, in Tipton's own quarters — the first Masonic lodge meeting in northern Indiana, as the state's historical marker at the fort site now records. On October 10, 1823, the Grand Lodge granted the charter that first joined the name and number, Wayne Lodge No. 25; Tipton constituted the lodge under it on November 17, 1823, and at the first election, on December 15, was chosen Worshipful Master himself. Allen County was not organized until the following spring: the lodge is older than the county, older than the town government, and nearly as old as the plat.

The first bylaws fined an absent officer twenty-five cents and an absent member twelve and a half, unless excused. The first candidate initiated was Lambert Cauchois, on August 17, 1824; the first applicant for membership was rejected unanimously, the record notes without a name. The first Masonic burial was Captain James Hackley's, in May 1826. In 1831 the lodge built for itself — a brick temple at the northeast corner of Harrison and Columbia, among the first lodge buildings in Indiana — and then the Morgan affair's anti-Masonic storm, which was killing lodges across the country, reached Fort Wayne. On February 20, 1833, Wayne Lodge suspended its meetings indefinitely; the new temple was sold for $1,328. Before the closing the lodge had counted fifty-four members.

The revival, when it came, was ragged in a way the lodge's own printed history does not hide: the charter was at one point forfeited — the Grand Lodge declared it forfeited in 1847 for non-payment of dues — and at another point, the lodge's 1898 roster records, the charter itself was stolen and a duplicate had to be issued. Restoration came on May 30, 1849, and the brethren celebrated it that Fourth of July. The National Register nomination for the present temple dates "the present Wayne Lodge" to that 1849 charter, while the lodge counts its two centuries from 1823; both datings rest on the same documents, and the lodge's bicentennial was kept in 2023. Wayne Lodge became the mother lodge of Masonry in Allen County — most of the county's later Masonic bodies, and Tipton Lodge at Logansport besides, drew their first officers from its roster. Its minute books for 1823–1958, full of the names that now mark Fort Wayne's streets — Ewing, Hanna, Foster, Rudisill, Wells — have been digitized by the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center. The lodge still meets, on the first Thursday of the month from September to June, in the Ionic Room of the Masonic Temple on East Washington Boulevard.

Sources:

1. Albert E. Thomas, History of Wayne Lodge, No. 25, F. & A.M., Fort Wayne, Indiana (1911), address delivered at the lodge's 88th anniversary banquet, March 30, 1911 — dispensation, charter, first officers.
2. Robert S. Robertson, "The Valley of Fort Wayne: An Historical Address on Masonry in Fort Wayne and Allen County" (1897), printed in Roster of the Masonic Bodies in Allen County (1898) — forfeiture 1847, restoration May 30, 1849, the stolen charter, the 54 members.
3. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Vol. I (1917), "Organization of Wayne Lodge of Masons."
4. Fort Wayne News, "Eighty-Six Years of Lodge History" (1909) — suspension February 20, 1833, the 1831 temple and its sale, first candidate and first burial.
5. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Masonic Temple, Fort Wayne (1991) — the 1849 dating of the present lodge.
6. Grand Lodge of Indiana, lodge listing for Wayne Lodge No. 25; Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, Wayne Lodge minute books collection.