Georgia Lodge Selling Mini Iron Pans As Fundraiser

by Christopher Hodapp

Landrum Lodge 48 in Savannah, Georgia is partnering with the appropriately-named Lodge Cast Iron company to create the first-ever Masonic cast iron mini skillets.

As a fundraiser they are offering this unique set of three miniature cast iron skillets representing the three degrees of Freemasonry: the Entered Apprentice with the square, compass, sun & moon; the Fellowcraft with the square, compass, and two pillars; and the Master Mason with the square, compass, and sprigs of acacia. The set will come in a custom printed cardboard box fit for display. Crafted in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, these naturally seasoned mini pans are the perfect size for serving individual cookies or brownies. Seasoned and ready to use.

Price is US$99.99 for the set. Orders are shipped within 2-business days​

Click here to order.

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New York's "Welcome Brother" Package

by Christopher Hodapp

A new Entered Apprentice with the moniker Zealousideal-Hunt242 posted this photo on Reddit of a 'welcome box' of information and Masonic swag he recently received from the Grand Lodge of New York. Looks to be his dues card, a coffee cup, a set of stickers, a 'Welcome Brother" booklet of reference information, and a bottle of hand sanitizer (for cleanup after making those dodgy handshakes we're so famous for, dontcha know). 

Not a bad little welcome package from the grand lodge level, and a minimal expense to make a good impression on a new member. Nicely done. The box alone can be filled with anything: grand masters' pin, a tie, a special 'new Brother' name badge, a grand lodge monitor, a directory of lodges in the state with visitation protocols, a memory stick with loads of information... anything to cement the feeling that the fraternity has invested some effort and consideration in welcoming a new member. In other words, something more than just an invoice for the year's dues, an invitation to the appendant groups, and a plea to become an officer.

Calling All Masonic Gamers: 'On The Square'

by Christopher Hodapp

Two talented brethren in England have come up with a new board game pitched specifically to Freemasons, called On The Square. This game originally got developed from a Kickstarter campaign, and it's now available for purchase.

The website explains the basics HERE:

On the Square is 2-6 player (Augmented) set-collection game based on establishing an English Freemasons meeting.

The aim of the game is to collect ceremonial items from around the board, whilst greeting the other officers in-order along the way, before returning to your seat to begin the proceedings. The first player to do so wins the game.

Using player boards to keep track of their items, players make their way around a game board laid out to accurately represent an English lodge with iconography taken directly from the Metropolitan grand lodge in central London. However, movement around this board is deceptively strategic.

The current price is UK £41.00, which translates to US $51.87.

During the month of May, the makers of On The Square have a special offer for customers:

For all orders placed between May 5th and June 2nd 2022:

1 copy of the game for 2-6 players. Includes FREE shipping.

+ FREE 1st & 2nd edition Mysteries & Secretes Masonic Themed Playing cards

+ FREE Blank greeting Cards (Featuring original Mysteries & Secrets Aces Playing Cards)

The Masonic-themed playing cards added as a bonus item are fascinating all by themselves. The decks replace the traditional four suits with Masonic orders:

Be sure to take notice about shipping on the website, as these games are being sold and shipped from England. The company lists a couple of different shipping speeds and rates.

Has He The Pass?

by Christopher Hodapp

I'm not sure if this is a cool doorknob for a lodge room, or just disturbing. Whichever, it's $34.95 from the Friendyness.com website.

Description claims it's handmade, which goes without saying.

Masonic Cowboy Boots

The weather wizards are already predicting snow here in Indiana on Halloween night, which is usually the point at which the few responsible people in the world start thinking they're behind on considering Christmas presents. So I occasionally spot things others might consider to be proper Masonic gift items.

Despite the fact that my in-laws all relocated to Texas in the 1980s, cowboy hats and cowboy boots fall into the category of stuff I don't own. Horses and I have never mixed well (all of them I have ever ridden have decidedly been diabolical and unholy escorts of Beelzebub himself, and entirely untrustworthy to invest my life upon for any length of time). Thus, I classify personally owning the associated apparel to be fraudulent. 

That's as may be - the world is nevertheless filled with folks who never punched a single head of cattle who cheerfully have closets full of cowboy headgear and footwear. Masons included. And so...

Teskey's saddle shop in Weatherford, Texas is offering online a line of both Freemason and Past Master cowboy boots, in round and square toe design, priced at $399 a pair. These have been made by the Anderson Bean Boot Company, in Texas. They are described as having 10" tops, hand-tooled, with leather soles, double-stitched. 

Masonic Metal Artisans

“And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre. He was a widow's son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to King Solomon, and wrought all his work. . .  In the plain of Jordan did the King cast them, in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarthan.”

This fraternity is blessed with an abundance of talented craftsmen in all sorts of creative fields. Metalwork has always fascinated me, in part because its mysteries have always eluded my own feeble attempts. In recent weeks I've encountered three beautiful examples of Masonic artists working in metal to create works for the fraternity.

On Facebook this week, Brother Robert Todd in Edmunton, Alberta posted this fascinating steel fire pit he fabricated (see photo above). It features the Masonic square and compass, the logo of Shriners International, and a Royal Arch symbol.

What makes any lodge special are the gifts its members bring and add to its many  treasures collected ever since receiving its charter 10, 50, or 150 years ago. Those gifts personalize and make every lodge unique from any other.

 

Several months ago when I visited Salem Lodge in Salem, Indiana (the Mother lodge of PGM Dwight L. Smith), I was smitten with their officer rod floor stands, individually designed for each station's by one of their members. If someone can let me know his name, I'll be happy to add it here. I've never seen anything like them before or since.

Last Sunday, Brother Bill Corey dropped by my table at the Indiana Masonic Home Festival and handed me this handmade square and compass (photo above). Bill is a blacksmith, and he fabricated a steel lewis several months ago, along with other Masonic-related items. I mentioned that a rough, hand-made square and compass would be appropriate for the recently opened 1860s Wild Cat Masonic Lodge Room up at Adams Mill in Cutler, Indiana. He was happy to oblige with this beautiful work. 

It started life as an old rusty nail.

Speaking of Adam's Mill...

While not crafted by a Brother Mason, I also want highlight this beautiful punched tin lantern featuring the square and compass, letter G, the 47th problem of Euclid, and more. It was made by tin craftsman Bruce Panek of Columbus, Ohio. We'll use it to illuminate the 'G' in open lodge in the historic lodge room at the Mill. Panek made a large number of these for the Grand lodge of Ohio's bicentennial celebration a few years ago, and they were used as traveling visitation trophies to encourage lodges to visit each other in their various districts there.

I met Mr. Panek at Lafayette's Feast of the Hunter's Moon a few years ago. These type of 18th century fairs and recreation events are the perfect place to connect with artisans who specifically work in historic craft designs.

Brother Lee Tweedie illuminates the G at Adam's Mill

Historic Wild Cat Lodge Room at Adam's Mill

'What Treasures Does Your Lodge Hold?'

This little essay was posted on the Grand Lodge of Mississippi's Facebook page from WB Rick Clifton, Past Master of Bay Springs Lodge 167:

What Treasures Does Your Lodge Hold?

When Minute Books of fifty of the oldest American Lodges as of the period between 1800 and 1825 are compared with the Minute Books of the same Lodges as of the period 1900 to 1925 it will be discovered that the subject of the Lodge inventory was somewhere lost, abandoned, forgotten in the years between. Every so often in the early days a Secretary, with loving care, and often with an openly expressed pride, wrote out his inventory; and such inventories are for us now one of the best sources for a knowledge of what Lodge life was a century and a half ago. Those inventories coincidentally make vivid and clear one thing wrong with Lodge life now— something lost out of Masonry, like the Lost Word, an old Landmark unintentionally violated; a thing lost though not necessarily beyond recall.

The inventory was not of the carpets, walls, windows, or other structural equipment, nor was it for real estate or taxation or fire insurance purposes; it was an inventory of the treasures of the Lodge. In almost every instance each item was described as a gift from some Brother, or as a memento of some occasion long remembered; there were oil portraits, framed prints, photographs; jewels kept in cases, of silver, and engraved, once the property of officers who later had presented them to the Lodge; aprons, collars, ballot boxes, gavels, Bibles and books, music books, an organ, sets of plate, glass and dishes, altar coverings, certificates, cherished letters in frames, punch bowls There were gifts which the Lodge had made to itself, such as hand-made carved chairs for the officers or a visitors' book bound in morocco. The Lodge Room had a feeling of being richly furnished; it was filled with the emblems and symbols of Freemasonry, of the Lodge's own past, of the community's esteem for it, and that the members who had gone were not completely gone.

Men loved their Lodge, and because they did there was no need to devise schemes for persuading them to attend.

In every Lodge, even the crassest, there are these untapped feelings of affection. Each one should have an inventory. When a Lodge room is empty, its walls bare, it has no atmosphere of its own. It does not feel like home. The Ritual loses its soul because it has not the environment it requires.

The worst effect of the bare Lodge room is that its Masonry in turn becomes barren because the Lodge has only the sense of being in a room and does not have a sense of being in the midst of a living and moving Fraternity; nor can it have a sense of its own past, or the Fraternity's past, but sinks into a feeling of isolation and flatness—it cannot even have a banquet because it has nothing to have it with. The inventory was one of riches; the riches came not out of the members' dues but out of their affection.

Rick Clifton, PM

Bay Springs #167

WB Clifton's thoughtful piece echoes a passage that H. L. Haywood wrote in his 1948 book 'More About Masonry,' and it can't be over-stated:

"In the Eighteenth Century Lodges the Feast bulked so large in the lodge that in many of them the members were seated at the table when the lodges were opened and remained at it throughout the Communication, even when the degrees were conferred. The result was that Masonic fellowship was good fellowship in it, as in a warm and fruitful soil, acquaintanceship, friendship, and affection could flourish - there was no grim and silent sitting on a bench, staring across at a wall. Out of this festal spirit flowered the love which Masons had for their lodge. They brought gifts to it, and only by reading of old inventories can any present day Mason measure the extent of that love; there were gifts of chairs, tables, altars, pedestals, tapestries, draperies, silver, candle-sticks, oil paintings, libraries, Bibles, mementos, curios, regalia’s and portraits. The lodge was a home, warm, comfortable, luxurious, full of memories, and tokens, and affection, and even if a member died his, presence was never wholly absent; to such a lodge no member went grudgingly, nor had to be coaxed, nor was moved by that ghastly, cold thing called a sense of duty, but went as if drawn by a magnet, and counted the days until he could go.

"What business has any lodge to be nothing but a machine for grinding out the work: It was not called into existence in order to have the minutes read: Even a mystic tie will snap under the strain of cheerlessness, repetition, monotony, dullness. A lodge needs a fire lighted in it, and the only way to have that warmth is to restore the lodge Feast, because when it is restored, good fellowship and brotherly love will follow, and where good fellowship is, members will fill up an empty room not only with themselves but also with their gifts."

What business, indeed... 

Mt. Vernon 2011 Christmas Ornament: Washington's Prayer At Valley Forge

Each year, the White House Historical Society, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and the U.S. Capitol all offer collectible Christmas ornaments through www.whitehousechristmasornament.com. The 2011 Mount Vernon ornament features a snow scene of Mount Vernon on one side, and artist Arnold Friberg's (1913-2010) famous 1975 painting of George Washington and "The Prayer at Valley Forge" on the other (oddly uncredited to the artist on the website).

The ornament is available for $28.

The story of Brother Washington praying in the snow comes from a diary of Isaac Potts. From the website:

Isaac Potts, 26 years old, was a resident of Valley Forge, and as a Quaker was opposed to the war. He supervised the grinding of the grain which George Washington ordered the neighboring farmers to bring to his army. The fullest account of Potts' testimony is in the "Diary and Remembrances" of Rev. Nathaniel Randolph Snowden, a Presbyterian minister and a Princeton graduate (Original Manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Call no. PHi.Am.1561-1568).

"I was riding with him (Mr. Potts) near Valley Forge, where the army lay during the war of the Revolution. Mr. Potts was a Senator in our state and a Whig. I told him I was agreeably surprised to find him a friend to his country as the Quakers were mostly Tories. He said, "It was so and I was a rank Tory once, for I never believed that America could proceed against Great Britain whose fleets and armies covered the land and ocean. But something very extraordinary converted me to the good faith."

"What was that?" I inquired. "Do you see that woods, and that plain?" It was about a quarter of a mile from the place we were riding. "There," said he, "laid the army of Washington. It was a most distressing time of ye war, and all were for giving up the ship but that one good man. In that woods," pointing to a close in view, "I heard a plaintive sound, as of a man at prayer. I tied my horse to a sapling and went quietly into the woods and to my astonishment I saw the great George Washington on his knees alone, with his sword on one side and his cocked hat on the other. He was at Prayer to the God of the Armies, beseeching to interpose with his Divine aid, as it was ye Crisis and the cause of the country, of humanity, and of the world.

"Such a prayer I never heard from the lips of man. I left him alone praying. I went home and told my wife, 'I saw a sight and heard today what I never saw or heard before', and just related to her what I had seen and heard and observed. We never thought a man could be a soldier and a Christian, but if there is one in the world, it is Washington. We thought it was the cause of God, and America could prevail."

I have a personal fondness for Friberg's painting, and I presented a framed print of it to my mother lodge, Broad Ripple No. 643, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary in 2001. Friberg was a successful commercial artist after WWII and studied under Norman Rockwell. In 1953 he was hired by Cecil B. DeMille to create preproduction paintings for the epic The Ten Commandments, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.