Mishawaka Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders: The Lodge City's Other Charter Roll

Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders · The Lodge City's Other Charter Roll

Mishawaka's second government met after dark, in rooms over the stores on Main Street, and it ran on paper: charters, dispensations, assessments, benefit certificates. The town's first lodge was organized about 1843, when the place was a decade old, and by 1907 the county's historian counted some two dozen bodies in a single roster — lodges, chapters, tents, hives, camps, courts and a tribe — nearly every one of them with a women's body beside it. It should be said plainly, because the record says it plainly, what the machinery inside the mystery was. A few of these orders were what their names suggest: brotherhoods of ritual and degree, the Masons above all. Most of the roster, though, was the insurance industry of the workingman's era wearing regalia. The tents, hives, camps and courts sold what commercial insurers would not sell a factory hand on terms he could carry — a sick benefit, a burial, a death payment to the widow — and collected it in small assessments, lodge night by lodge night. The Catholic courts and councils on the roster were the same machine built inside the parishes, after the Church's own law had warned the faithful off the secular orders. And the whole system is documented here from the orders' side: who chartered what, who held the pen for it, how long the record carries it, and what is left. Nothing in this section rests on a body's mystique; where a claim of secret antiquity is part of an order's story, it is printed as the order's claim, in the order's own frame, and no stronger.