October Stated Communication

Dinner (6PM) will be soup, salad and breadsticks. Ladies are welcome to join and have fellowship during the Lodge time. The program for the evening will be a presentation from Art Hebbeler III, "Colonial American Freemasonry and its Development to 1770."

ABSTRACT

This lecture, drawn from the author’s 1988 master’s thesis and later archival work, examines Speculative Freemasonry in British North America from the first Provincial Grand Master in 1730 to 1770. It treats the Craft as a social and cultural institution, not a political cabal, and asks whether lodge teachings of brotherly love, relief, and truth shaped members’ lives outside the lodge. Using lodge records, Grand Lodge archives, and colonial newspapers, it traces rapid growth in port cities—Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston—and weaker presence inland. Still under English and Scottish provincial authority, lodges offered rare “on the level” meeting places that mixed merchants, officers, planters, and artisans. Pr…