St. Joseph Lodge No. 45: the first secret society in South Bend

1840 — present

A lodge eleven years younger than the town: The Grand Lodge of Indiana's own lodge record gives St. Joseph Lodge No. 45 its founding date as 24 May 1842, the date of its charter. Chapman's county history, written within living memory of the event, adds the two years the charter does not show: the lodge "was instituted by charter in 1842, having worked two years previous under dispensation." Masons were therefore meeting in South Bend under authority from 1840, a decade after the town was laid out and nineteen years before it was a city. Chapman found the lodge in 1880 "always in a flourishing condition," meeting the first Monday of each month in its hall in the Lincoln Block, 118 Michigan Street, and he prints its officers for that year: John E. Kelley, Worshipful Master; John W. Harbou, Senior Warden; John McBain, Junior Warden; Jasper E. Lewis, Secretary; Edwin Nicar, Treasurer. The lodge's most consequential nineteenth-century candidate was the town's own congressman: Schuyler Colfax was initiated in Lebanon Lodge No. 7 in Washington on 15 August 1856, while serving in Congress, and was passed and raised in St. Joseph Lodge No. 45 at home on 5 September 1856 — a Masonic career recorded by his Washington lodge's own published history. The lodge still meets at 427 North Main Street, in the Scottish Rite cathedral building, and the Grand Lodge's directory carries its secretary's name in the present tense: this is a going concern of 184 years' standing, the oldest continuously documented secret society in the city.

Sources:

1. Grand Lodge of Indiana, F. & A.M., lodge directory: St. Joseph Lodge No. 45, 427 N. Main St., South Bend — "Founded: May 24, 1842."
2. C. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "Masonic" — dispensation years, the Lincoln Block hall, the 1880 officers.
3. William R. Singleton–Hope–Lebanon Lodge No. 7, Washington, D.C., published lodge history — Colfax initiated there 15 Aug. 1856, passed and raised in St. Joseph Lodge No. 45 on 5 Sept. 1856.