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1862 — 2001
Three more lodges, one in German: The Civil War years doubled the city's Masonry and gave it a lodge that worked in another language. Chapman records South Bend Lodge No. 294, instituted in 1863, meeting the first Friday of the month, and Germania Lodge No. 301, instituted in 1862, which "conducts the services in the German language," meeting the first Thursday, with John Klingel as its master in 1880. The numbering and the dates sit oddly together — No. 301 chartered, on Chapman's showing, a year before No. 294 — and both stand as Chapman printed them; the Grand Lodge's charter sequence was not a simple clock. Germania Lodge is a measure of the German city inside the city: its members were the same men who kept the Turn-Verein and the Maennerchor, and one of its first members, John C. Knoblock, was master of it "off and on for ten years." The twentieth century added Portage Lodge No. 675, meeting at the temple by 1921 with John H. White as master, and the contraction of the late century took it away again by merger rather than death: Portage Lodge No. 675 merged into St. Joseph Lodge No. 45 in 2001, a fact carried in the Grand Commandery of Indiana's published biography of James L. Bolinger, who had been raised in Portage Lodge in 1979, served it twice as master, and then served the merged St. Joseph Lodge as secretary from 2001 and master in 2009. Germania Lodge does not appear in the 1921 directory's Masonic roster at all — the German-language lodge that Chapman and Howard both list is absent from Polk's pages two years after the First World War, and its end is carried here as that documented absence: no dissolution record for it was reached.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), "Masonic" — South Bend Lodge No. 294 (1863); Germania Lodge No. 301 (1862), German-language work, 1880 officers; and the Knoblock biographical sketch (Chapman, part 92).
- Polk's South Bend City Directory (1921), "Secret and Benevolent Societies: Masonic" — Portage Lodge No. 675 in the 1921 roster; Germania Lodge absent.
- Grand Commandery Knights Templar of Indiana, Proceedings (2015–2016), biographical sketch of James L. Bolinger — Portage No. 675 merged with St. Joseph No. 45 in 2001.