The Order of Owls: a national secret order founded in South Bend

1904 — the order's course

The one order this city invented: On 20 November 1904, in the law offices of Talbot and Talbot in South Bend, a group of businessmen who had been meeting for mutual assistance adopted a constitution and founded the Order of Owls. The founders named in the order's record are John W. Talbot, Joseph E. Talbot, George D. Beroth, J. Lott Losey, John J. Johnson, John D. Burke, William Weaver and Frank Dunbar. The order's stated purposes were the classic ones — to assist each other in business, help each other to employment, aid the widows and orphans of members, and meet for mutual pleasure — worked through four degrees, with ritual, passwords and grips, local bodies called nests, and a national government called the Supreme Nest under a Supreme President, who was John W. Talbot.

Howard, writing three years after the founding, treats the hometown order with hometown pride: the Owls had "experienced a phenomenal growth, having flourishing nests from the Atlantic to the Pacific," and his roster prints the Supreme Nest's whole officer corps, all South Bend men. The 1921 directory finds the Supreme Nest still governing from 136–138 North Main Street, with South Bend Nest No. 8 and Ladies' Nest No. 1 meeting in Owls' Hall below it. The standard fraternal encyclopedias give the order's claimed scale in the early 1920s as over 600,000 members in 2,148 nests — the order's own claim, printed here as such — and its headquarters left South Bend for Hartford, Connecticut, by the 1930s. The founder's fall is in the public record and belongs to this account: in 1921 John W. Talbot was convicted under the federal Mann Act and sentenced to five years at Leavenworth and a $5,000 fine. The order he founded outlived him in diminished form — the encyclopedias carry some 40,000 members in 1979 and nests in five states — but its capital years were South Bend's: for two decades this city was not merely a lodge town but the seat of a national secret order.

Sources:

1. Howard (1907), societies chapter — the Owls "recently established," Talbot's work, the Supreme Nest officers, the Home Nest and Ladies' Nest No. 1.
2. Polk (1921), "Order of Owls" — the Supreme Nest at 136–138 N. Main; Nest No. 8; the 1921 supreme officers.
3. Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Institutions, 1980), "Owls, Order of" — the 20 Nov. 1904 founding at Talbot and Talbot's offices, the founders, purposes, degrees, claimed membership, the Hartford removal, and Talbot's 1921 conviction and sentence.