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Aberdeen to Zebulon: |
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Tracking priceless Masonic artifacts
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Artifacts can be common wooden nickels or priceless aprons worn by heroes. Find them among old things when you move your home to another city, wondering whether to toss them or call the Grand Lodge about your surprising discovery.
Masons are masters of understanding values of tangibles to the fraternity. They know that sentimental value to a Masonic family or lodge is every bit as important, or more important, as professionally appraised value.
Nothing so quickly touches a Mason’s heart as beholding a recent widow asking if her husband’s Bahnson Manual or 50-year certificate has value to his or any lodge. And nothing hardens his heart more than learning that old fraternal records had been lost or destroyed simply because there was no longer any room for proper storage. Fires have turned into ashes treasures like the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt, and documents in Revolutionary North Carolina.
Yet the hunt goes on.
Historians, educators, researchers refuse to stop looking for things thought long gone.
Cornerstones ceremoniously laid by Masons centuries ago remain hidden in public buildings until they are exhumed to reveal priceless remnants of history.
Isolation endangers! A Masonic emblem owned by Brother Joseph Dickson, member of Phalanx 31, is in the custody of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. The Micajah Bullock flag that is believed to have survived the Revolutionary battle of Guilford Courthouse is alone in the attic of the NC Museum of History in Raleigh.
Five thousand Masonic items have been catalogued and babied at the Masonic museum in Greensboro’s Scottish Rite Temple. Lodges assemble meaningful objects from their recent and ancient past and place them honorably and proudly within their meeting halls.
Masons see hope and promise in the recent movement of Masonic artifacts to the safe confines of the Masonic Archive of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. When Warren Twiddy read that the Grand Lodge’s archives had been transferred to UNC, he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d worried for years about protecting old documents at Unanimity 7, especially since that lodge had once gone dark for half a century. The following paragraphs by Editor Ric Carter were published in the March/April 2007 North Carolina Mason:
“Years ago Twiddy looked at the old minute books and correspondence. He feared they would be lost or become someone’s trash or be washed into oblivion by a rogue hurricane. He didn’t have a big plan, but he had the time and inclination and a little plan. He could do his part.
“Twiddy went through the papers, arranging them by year in file folders. He gathered the old minute books and organized them. Then he got fire resistant filing cabinets. There, on the second floor of their waterfront lodge building, he carefully stashed away the archives of his lodge.
“There he placed the minutes of the first lodge meetings in Edenton in 1775. There were the ledger books listing the names of the early members of the lodge and their dues paid. There were records of the spending of the lodge and the making of new Masons. There were the records of their getting the Washington (Bucktrout) Chair. There were recorded the more mundane happenings of the lodge—the components of a rich, original history.
“When he heard about the Grand Lodge’s agreement with the Southern Historical Collection, he knew the rest of his plan. He went to his lodge and suggested that they send those old records to be with the Masonic Archive at the University of North Carolina. The lodge agreed that it was the thing to do to reduce the chance of some tragic quirk of nature robbing them of those moments in history.”
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Produced by the public relations committee of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Masons in North Carolina,
2921 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27628 MMVIII
Author/editor: Walter J. Klein wklein(at)carolina.rr.com
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