Freemasonry arrived in the American colonies almost as soon as there were American colonies worth speaking of, and by the time those colonies declared independence, the fraternity had become part of the civic fabric of the new nation. Several of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were Masons. The general who commanded the Continental Army was a Mason. The French officer who helped him win at Yorktown was a Mason. The fraternity did not make the American republic, but many of the men who did were formed, in part, by what the lodge had given them.
American Freemasonry is not a single institution. It is a family of sovereign grand lodges, one for each state and territory, each governing its own jurisdiction and recognizing the others as legitimate. No national grand lodge exists. That structure reflects the same federal instinct that shaped the country itself: sovereign states in voluntary association, united by shared principles and mutual recognition rather than by central authority.
The Colonial Lodges (1730–1760)
The first documented Masonic lodge on American soil was established in Boston in 1733, when Henry Price received a warrant from the Grand Lodge of England authorizing him to operate as Provincial Grand Master for North America. St. John's Lodge, meeting at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, was the first regular lodge under that authority. Within months, Price was issuing warrants to lodges in other cities.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin had been attending lodge meetings as early as 1730. He reprinted Anderson's Constitutions, the founding document of modern speculative Freemasonry, in 1734, the first Masonic publication in America. That same year he became Grand Master of Pennsylvania. Franklin's involvement illustrates something characteristic of American Masonry from its beginning: the fraternity attracted men of intellectual ambition and civic purpose, men who found in the lodge a community of like-minded Brethren and a framework for the kind of principled public life they were already committed to.
Lodges spread through the colonial port cities in the 1730s and 1740s, drawing merchants, lawyers, physicians, military officers, and craftsmen. They met in taverns and private rooms, built networks of trust across the class boundaries that colonial society otherwise enforced, and maintained the connections to British Masonic authority that kept them within the recognized fraternity.
Two Traditions: The Ancients and the Moderns (1751–1813)
American Freemasonry was shaped from the outset by a division in the British Craft that arrived with the immigrants who carried it across the Atlantic. The original Grand Lodge of England, formed in 1717, became known as the Moderns. In 1751, a rival body calling itself the Antients, or Ancients, was formed in London by Irish and Scottish Masons who believed the Moderns had altered ancient practices and departed from the proper working of the ritual.
The Ancients published their own constitution, the Ahiman Rezon, in 1756 under the authorship of Laurence Dermott, their Grand Secretary. The rivalry between the two bodies was genuine, and each granted warrants to American lodges, with the result that both Ancient and Modern lodges operated in the colonies through the Revolutionary period. The Ancients were particularly strong in the South and among Irish and Scottish immigrant communities.
St. Andrew's Lodge in Boston, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1756, was an Ancient lodge. Paul Revere received his degrees there in 1760 and eventually served as Grand Master of Massachusetts. The Green Dragon Tavern, where St. Andrew's Lodge met, was the gathering place where many of the plans and conversations that led to the Boston Tea Party took place.
The division between the Ancients and Moderns persisted in American Masonry for decades after the two English bodies reconciled and formed the United Grand Lodge of England in 1813. Several American grand lodges had been formed under one warrant or the other and retained their distinct identities. The practical effect was that American Masonry developed with a plurality of traditions, a characteristic it has maintained. Even today, Masonic practice varies more across American jurisdictions than it does in most other countries.
Freemasonry and the American Revolution (1760–1783)
By the time the colonies moved toward independence, Masonic lodges were operating in every significant town along the eastern seaboard. The fraternity provided something the political crisis made particularly valuable: a trusted network that crossed colonial boundaries and social ranks, bound by obligations that members took seriously.
George Washington was initiated into Freemasonry on November 4, 1752, at Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 in Virginia. He was passed to the Fellow Craft degree on March 3, 1753, and raised to Master Mason on August 4 of the same year. Washington never made Freemasonry a central public identity, but he never distanced himself from it either. He attended lodge when he could, accepted Masonic honors graciously, and was present at the laying of the United States Capitol cornerstone in 1793 in full Masonic regalia. The fraternity's values of moral order, brotherhood across difference, and fidelity to one's obligations were consistent with his own public character.
The Marquis de Lafayette, whose name and whose apron this lodge carries, was made a Mason in America during the Revolution, almost certainly at or near Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 and 1778. His account, preserved by a contemporary, was that he was not a Mason when he arrived in America and became one after meeting Washington. The friendship between the two men, grounded in shared values and deepened by the fraternal bond, became one of the most celebrated relationships of the founding era. When Lafayette returned to America in 1824 for the nation's fiftieth anniversary, he was received as a Brother as much as a hero.
The military lodges of the Continental Army were significant institutions. These traveling lodges, warranted to operate with specific regiments, brought officers and enlisted men together in lodge and maintained the fraternal culture through the privations of a long war. American Union Lodge No. 1, associated with the Continental Army, was among the most active. The men who came through those lodges carried their Masonic memberships and the relationships formed there into the civic life of the new republic.
Building an American Fraternity (1783–1826)
After independence, American Masonry faced the question of governance. The colonial lodges had operated under British authority. That authority was no longer appropriate, and in any case the break from Britain made it unavailable. State grand lodges had begun forming during the war itself, and by 1800 most states had their own sovereign grand lodge governing the lodges within their borders.
This structure, one grand lodge per state with no national body above them, was deliberate. American Masons were suspicious of centralized authority for the same reasons American citizens were, and the state grand lodge system reflected the federalist architecture of the republic. Each grand lodge was sovereign in its jurisdiction and recognized its peers as equals. Disputes between jurisdictions were resolved through negotiation and mutual recognition, not hierarchy.
The fraternity grew steadily through the early republic. Lodges appeared in new towns as the country expanded westward. The appendant bodies took root: the Royal Arch, the Knights Templar, and eventually the Scottish Rite established themselves in American cities and began the process of developing the American versions of their rituals and structures. Albert Pike, raised as a Mason in Arkansas in 1850, would eventually become the dominant figure in that development, spending thirty years reshaping the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction into the philosophically coherent institution it became under his tenure as Sovereign Grand Commander.
Prince Hall Freemasonry: A Parallel American Tradition
American Freemasonry has always had two parallel traditions, and an honest history requires addressing both.
Prince Hall was a free Black man in Boston who, with a group of companions, sought admission to a Boston lodge in the years before the Revolution and was refused. In 1775, Hall and fourteen others received their Masonic degrees from a lodge attached to a British Army regiment stationed near Boston. After independence, they applied to the new American grand lodges for recognition and were refused again. In 1784, Prince Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England directly. The warrant for African Lodge No. 459 was issued in 1787, making it a regularly constituted lodge under British authority.
African Lodge No. 459 and its descendants formed what became the Prince Hall tradition of American Freemasonry: legitimate grand lodges, regularly constituted, practicing the same Craft as the mainstream bodies, and excluded from recognition by those bodies for most of their history for reasons that were explicitly racial. Prince Hall grand lodges operated in most states by the mid-nineteenth century, maintaining the fraternity's principles of brotherhood under conditions of legal segregation and systematic exclusion.
The movement toward mutual recognition between mainstream and Prince Hall grand lodges began in earnest in the late twentieth century. Connecticut led in 1989. By the early 2000s, most mainstream American grand lodges had formally recognized their Prince Hall counterparts. The process was overdue by several generations, and the Masonic principles of brotherly love and equality of the lodge room applied as clearly to the question as they ever have to anything.
The Morgan Affair and the Anti-Masonic Movement (1826–1845)
The most serious crisis in American Masonic history began in Batavia, New York, in 1826. William Morgan, a man of uncertain Masonic standing, announced his intention to publish an expose of Masonic ritual and secrets. Before the book appeared, Morgan was abducted from the jail where he had been held on a minor charge. He was never seen again. The presumption that Masons had murdered him to protect their secrets spread quickly, and the public reaction was severe.
The Anti-Masonic Movement that followed was a genuine popular and political force. An Anti-Masonic Party formed and achieved significant electoral success in several states in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Lodges closed across New England and New York. Membership dropped sharply. Grand lodges in some states went dormant. The fraternity, which had been a natural part of public life since the colonial period, found itself the subject of genuine suspicion and hostility.
The crisis passed over roughly two decades, but its effects were lasting. American Masonry emerged from the Anti-Masonic period with a more careful public posture and a greater emphasis on the private character of lodge work. The fraternity had learned, at real cost, that public prominence invites public scrutiny, and that the scrutiny is not always friendly.
The Golden Age and Its Aftermath (1865–1970)
The decades following the Civil War brought a sustained period of growth that made American Freemasonry, at its peak, the largest fraternal organization in the world. Membership grew from roughly 200,000 in 1860 to more than two million by 1900, and continued climbing through the early twentieth century. Lodges anchored civic life in communities of every size. The appendant bodies expanded alongside them. Grand lodges built temples, funded charitable programs, and became visible pillars of American public life.
Rob Morris, who founded the Order of the Eastern Star and was named Poet Laureate of Freemasonry in 1884, was one of the figures whose work defined this era. His lodge in Denver, Rob Morris Lodge No. 92, was chartered in 1892 by men who had known him personally. Albert Pike, who died in 1891 after thirty-two years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction, left behind an institution he had built from eleven Consistories to a body operating in every Southern state. Both men are part of this lodge's direct history.
American Masonic membership peaked in the early 1960s at roughly four million. The decades that followed brought a decline that reflected broader changes in American civic life: the rise of television, the loosening of institutional loyalties, the fracturing of the associational culture that had sustained fraternal organizations for a century. Membership fell through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and has continued declining since. The fraternity that once claimed one in eight American adult men now claims closer to one in eighty.
What that decline represents depends on who you ask. Some view it as the natural adjustment of an institution that had grown beyond its sustainable scale. Others see the loss of something that civic life has not replaced: a space for men to meet across the boundaries of profession and class, bound by shared obligations and a common commitment to something larger than their immediate interests. Both readings have merit. The lodge that was there at the founding of the republic, that fought through the Anti-Masonic period and rebuilt, that produced Washington and Franklin and Lafayette and Pike and Morris, continues to operate in the cities and towns where its work began.
The Thread to Colorado
Freemasonry followed the American frontier westward as it always had, carried by men who brought their lodge memberships and their fraternal habits into new territory. The first Masonic gathering in what would become Colorado took place in 1858, in a tent at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte. The Grand Lodge of Colorado was constituted in 1861. The Denver Masonic Temple at 16th and Welton opened in 1890.
The full story of Freemasonry in Colorado, and of the lodges that formed this one, is covered on the Colorado Masonic History page. The American story told here is the tradition those lodges inherited and practiced. Schiller Lodge, Rob Morris Lodge, Albert Pike Lodge, Pythagoras Lodge, and Marquis de Lafayette Lodge are each part of the same unbroken line that runs from Henry Price's warrant in Boston in 1733 to a stated communication in Denver on a Wednesday evening.
Sources: Mark A. Tabbert, American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities (NYU Press, 2005); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Grand Lodge of Colorado (coloradofreemasons.org); United Grand Lodge of England (ugle.org.uk).