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Charlotte: |
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Historically the most important Masonic place in North Carolina
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If you concentrate, you can bring back the promising days of 1750 to 1774 and relive them here and now with Hezekiah Alexander.
He started his new life three miles from the square in Charlottetown, Mecklenburg County. There was peace at last with the Indians—five thousand of them living nearby on the Catawba River, the largest assembly of people in the Carolina back country.
The trail from Pennsylvania was true, frozen hard in the 1751 winter. Land was both cheap and rich. Hez did more than dream during his weeks on the trail. Sharp in his mind was the house he left behind. He was first to live in his beloved home in Maryland (“where the road from Lemaster to Upton crosses the Warm Spring road leading to Church Hill”). A little palace, they had called it. Hez was determined to build another just like it, more than 600 miles south.
He found qualified people to build it—the Bigham family of stone masons. This rock house would be the pride of the Bigham professionals for years to come, and they were eager to start. Hez was a blacksmith by trade, a Freemason by choice and a wise leader by birth.
Hez chose his site with care and with the approval of his family members who were busy buying land all around Mecklenburg County. It was close by Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church where his family could become active and hear the news from back home. It was situated on a spur just off the wagon trail that continued and split south of Charlottetown. There was a small but lively all-year stream, Alexander’s Mill Creek branch of Sugaw Creek, just below a little rise where he envisioned his new family home.
Hez personally staked out the house so it would face precisely south. He had his Masonic life keenly in mind at that special moment. From the weeks on the wagon trail he had planned this rock house to be not only a home for his wife and children but as a Masonic meeting house for his relatives living nearby and for Masons traveling between Philadelphia and Charleston.
How does a Mason screen brothers in dignity so they can attend meetings among other Masons they have never before met? Hez solved that problem as all lodges have done worldwide for centuries: examine them for their Masonic knowledge before they enter. How he did that was unique in America then and now.
He used one of the Bigham wood ladders and his blacksmith maul and chisels to inscribe Masonic signs and symbols across the face and sides of his new house. His work was not artistic because he never pretended to be a stonemason. But it did the job of examining and entertaining Masons new to Charlottetown. “What is that?” he would ask a guest. “Why, that is the trowel of a Mason.” “And what is this?” “The square and compasses, carved the way they do in France.”* “And this?” “Well, the crown symbolizes the Master of the lodge, sitting in the East.” “Yes, and this?” “My word, that is clearly symbolic of the password on the third degree of Masonry.”
After such an examination, the guest could be ushered into the next lodge meeting to be greeted and honored by the Alexander family Masons and others.
Hezekiah left Masonic messages to future Masons all over his “palace.”
By orienting the entire house to face south, he made it possible for his inscriptions on the house to form a map of every Masonic lodge in the world! Brethren who behold the front of the house realize that the door and window positions represent a Masonic lodge floor plan. The cornerstone represents the tyler. The crown in the east stands for the Master. Other inscriptions represent stations and places in just the right spots. (Of course there is nothing in the north.)
To this day, the Hezekiah Alexander home in Charlotte is the only such building in America. It could be the oldest Masonic free-standing building in the nation. Small wonder so many Masons come to Charlotte to see this remarkable monument to the largest fraternity in the world.
* The particular square and compasses on the Alexander house wall is history in itself. The famous square and compasses of today was still in its formative years in 1772-74. From France came this unbalanced design showing compasses intersecting with a large square but not centered. This from Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia: “In early 18th century charts, either the Square or the Compass is often shown without the other and, when they are both included, they are never joined or interlaced or even near each other in the chart until about 1750.”
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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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