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Lodges & Fraternal Orders

Odd Fellows: the verified lodges, the Rebekah line, and the floor numbers' gap

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c. 1846–1913 · South Bend (boundary)

What verifies: South Bend's Odd Fellowship is old, and its most famous product is the women's degree itself. Schuyler Colfax — South Bend editor of the St. Joseph's Valley Register, later Vice President — was initiated into the Odd Fellows at the South Bend lodge about 1846, and Colfax authored the Degree of Rebekah, the women's degree of the order, which is why the Rebekahs stand in this row by name: the degree that made Odd Fellowship a family order was written by a South Bend Odd Fellow. The dated directory record adds a second named lodge: the Independent Order of Odd Fellows' 1913 continental directory (Fuller, comp.) carries on its Indiana roll Robert Blum Lodge No. 278, at South Bend. The row's floor numbers — St. Joseph Lodge No. 27 and Monitor Lodge No. 286 (the Mishawaka lodge of the floor pattern) — could not be verified against a grand-body record from open sources, and they are printed as the floor gives them, unverified, with their gap named. Named gap (in part): the verification of St. Joseph No. 27 and Monitor No. 286 by number, and the Rebekah lodges' names and numbers for this ground. Their settling sources are the Grand Lodge I.O.O.F. of Indiana proceedings and the Rebekah Assembly of Indiana records, with Howard's Odd Fellows sections (page images) as cross-check. No Odd Fellows or Rebekah body seats in Osceola or Penn Township in any record reached — the township's Odd Fellows, at the floor's height, belonged in Mishawaka or South Bend or not at all.

Sources: Donaldson, The Odd-Fellows' Text-Book and Manual (rev. ed. 1871) for Colfax's initiation and authorship of the Rebekah degree; Fuller (comp.), Directory of Subordinate Lodges, I.O.O.F. (1913) for Robert Blum No. 278.

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Source: Odd Fellows: the verified lodges, the Rebekah line, and the floor numbers' gap, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/osceola/secret-societies/odd-fellows-the-verified-lodges-the-rebekah-line-and/