About & History
Chartered December 8, 1850, under the Grand Lodge of North Carolina.
On August 8, 1850, a dispensation was issued in Raleigh to Brother L. Blackmer, Past Master of Palestine Lodge No. 120 at Gold Hill, to organize a new lodge “at Zion in Montgomery County.” On August 16, Brother Blackmer and two brethren of Palestine Lodge crossed the Pee Dee River at the Swift Island ferry and held the first meeting in the old county seat of Lawrenceville. Preston Wooley and George Makepeace received the first two degrees that day and were raised Master Masons the next. By the end of the year the lodge had passed twenty members, and its charter was issued on December 8, 1850, at a cost of ten dollars.
In November 1850 the lodge’s trustees, together with the local Sons of Temperance, bought a lot beside the Morganton–Fayetteville Turnpike at Zion to build a meeting hall. From 1855 Blackmer met on its second floor, beside Zion Methodist Church, sharing hitching space with the congregation and, for a time, the ground floor with a public school. The lodge carried on at reduced strength through the Civil War and lost members in the fighting.
As the community shifted south, the lodge bought Lot No. 6 on the Turnpike in Mount Gilead at auction in June 1875 and held its first meeting in the new building on April 13, 1878. The ground floor housed the Mount Gilead Academy under Professor Ransom Harris Skeen, a brother of the lodge, while the lodge kept the second floor. Local lore held that the Masons kept a large and ill-tempered goat upstairs to discourage curious students.
After the academy building was taken down in 1919, the lodge moved about the town: a small hall on the old lot, rooms above the McAuley Brothers store, a second-floor room at 105 North Main Street until a fire in April 1945, then 113 North Main, and from 1946 a room in the high school on School Street. On November 15, 1949, the brethren carried their furniture across the street and met that night in a new building on School Street, completed by the lodge together with American Legion Post No. 92.
Some of the lodge’s oldest furnishings made every move. The gavel stands at the three stations and the altar came from the original lodge at Zion, and the two columns at the Senior Warden’s station came from the 1875 building. The fire-damaged charter of 1850 survived as well.
Adapted from the History of Blackmer Lodge No. 127, written by Brother Marcus B. Andrews in July 1986 and revised in June 1995.
Freemasonry is one of the oldest fraternal organizations in the world. Its members are men who profess a belief in a Supreme Being and who meet to improve themselves, support one another, and serve their communities. Lessons are taught through three degrees: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason.
Freemasonry is not a religion and does not take the place of one. Discussion of sectarian religion and partisan politics is not permitted in a lodge.
Lodge Historian
The Lodge Historian keeps the record of Blackmer Lodge: its minute books, photographs, charter and papers, and the stories of the brethren who came before us. That record is still being written, and much of it lives in attics, scrapbooks and memories.
If you have old photographs of the lodge or its members, programs, newspaper clippings, letters, aprons or other items connected to Blackmer Lodge, or a story worth keeping, the Historian would be glad to hear from you. Items can be scanned or photographed and returned.
Share a photograph or memory