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Chartered 1867; Chapman (1880); banked at this history lk-civ-fraternal
The town's oldest club is Masonic, and its founding is a county historian's list. Lakeville Lodge No. 353, Free and Accepted Masons, was chartered in 1867; Chapman names its ten charter members, and the lodge stood at about fifty-two members by 1880. That is a founding at full documentary size — charter year, charter roll, and a thirteen-year membership count — of a kind no other Lakeville club in this section can match, because Chapman happened to print it. The lodge's later course prints at the strength of the fraternal record in this history; its hall is one of the town's standing club rooms, and the lodge remains the anchor fact of the town's club life: organised two years after the Civil War, in a town not yet thirty years platted.