"The decisive measure of the man is how he acts in public."
Snow was falling on the square at King and Railroad Streets, the center of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 20 February 1858. The economic focus of town had gradually moved four blocks west from King and Queen Streets since the railroad had brought passenger service in 1837. A winter storm that had arrived the previous day promised several inches of snow before day's end. The most important national story in that day's Shippensburg News, a four-page weekly newspaper with a subscription of 1,500, published by Edward W Curriden, was the ongoing Utah War between the Mormons and the U.S. Army. Abutting advertisements for Hembold's Genuine Patent Medicines, cabinetmakers, gravediggers, portraits on glass, and tinware stoves was the "Local and Variety Train" column, which was devoted to stories of local interest.
This day it ran a short piece about Mr. Thomas E. Fuller of Southampton Township, whose team of four horses pulled a wagon full of ice weighing almost eleven thousand pounds a distance of over three miles. The column also contained the brief announcement, "On Thursday evening a large number of Freemasons from a distance were attracted to Shippensburg to witness and assist in organizing a Lodge in this place" The previous week had seen Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, for Christians a forty-day season of fasting and penitence leading to Easter; the following Monday was the birthday of the nation's first president, George Washington, also a Freemason. Cumberland Valley Lodge No. 315, Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania thus began in the Shippensburg community sandwiched between two important religious and secular dates. This white-only Order would see a black-only counterpart established ten years later.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans had become joiners of organizations, and in the two decades between 1880 and 1900, almost five hundred women's clubs, professional societies, civic groups, reform associations, and fraternal orders engulfed the country. Interested people established groups for natives and immigrants, men and women, adults and children, Catholics and Protestants, and blacks and whites. The historian Lynn Deumenil argued that of these groups, "the archetypal secret fraternal order, as well as the most popular and prestigious, was the Free and Accepted Order of Masons." Freemasonry in the United States claimed over one-half million members in 1880, and would grow to over four times that number in the succeeding four decades to comprise 10 percent of the native-born, Protestant, white, adult male population of America (Figure 1). Although its membership growth slowed with the coming of the Great Depression, Freemasonry was arguably America's most preeminent secret organization. To understand how Freemasonry came to a small, south central Pennsylvania agricultural community, it was necessary to examine the origins of the Brotherhood.
The order of symbolic Masons grew out of an organization of working masons in medieval England. Employers in the Middle Ages hired masons in large working groups to construct cathedrals, castles, monasteries, and public buildings. The workers moved over the countryside together from job site to job site as they completed work on one building project and began work on another. These factors, in context of craft guilds, made working masons a tightly knit society. Sometimes before the early eighteenth century, they organized themselves into "lodges" and operated under a code called the Old Charges, guild rules that not only governed the work but also defined the "moral obligations regarding honesty, sobriety, piety, and loyalty to the king, all of which masons were bound to observe for the sake of their collective reputation. "
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