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Thomas Talbot Lodge, A.F. and A.M.

Thomas Talbot Lodge, A.F. and A.M., is the lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons in Billerica, a constituent lodge of the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts. It was formed at North Billerica in 1889 and named for the late Governor Thomas Talbot, the North Billerica woolen manufacturer, who had died in 1885. It met in North Billerica until 1896 and then at Gardner Parker Hall in the Centre, and from 1941 it had its own building, the Billerica Masonic Temple at 11 Concord Road, on the Common. The town bought that building in 2020, and the lodge now meets in Lowell.

Billerica had an earlier lodge. Clinton Lodge was chartered on June 14, 1826, to Dr. Zadok Howe and others, and Howe was its master from 1826 to 1830. It met in a building on Boston Road opposite the site of the later Central Fire Station. That building burned in 1828 with the lodge's jewels and furniture, the Grand Lodge received no more returns from the lodge, and its charter was surrendered on June 11, 1834.

According to the history of the lodge written for its fiftieth anniversary by Albert H. Richardson, the Masons of North Billerica studied the work at the home of John E. Rowell through the winter of 1888 and 1889. They held their first business meeting in the office of the Faulkner Manufacturing Company at the Faulkner Mills, by courtesy of its superintendent, Warren A. Evans. Ten brothers petitioned the Grand Master, Henry Endicott, for a dispensation: Charles H. Kohlrausch Jr., Henry M. Hutchins, Warren A. Evans, John E. Rowell, Hiram C. Brown, Robert Ritchie, Matthew H. Kohlrausch, Dr. Albert C. Lane, Herbert W. Sheldon and Saville D. Metcalf. The dispensation was granted in March 1889, and the first regular communication under it was held on March 12, 1889. Thirteen candidates were initiated under the dispensation, the first of them Jonas Whatmough on April 9, 1889; one of the others was James W. Ritchie. The charter is dated December 11, 1889, and the lodge was constituted on December 23, 1889, the date the directories gave as its founding. Kohlrausch was its first master, and Dr. Lane succeeded him in 1890 and 1891.

On February 23, 1889, the Baptist Society of North Billerica leased the lodge, for twenty years at fifty dollars a year, the unfinished space over the vestry of the North Billerica Baptist Church, which Governor Talbot had built for the society. The lodge was to finish a lodge room and an anteroom at its own cost, counted as rent paid in advance, and the society kept the use of the anteroom as a cloak room for festivals in the vestry. Kohlrausch, Rowell and Robert Ritchie signed for the lodge. The lodge began meeting in the new rooms in April 1889 and met there for the last time on November 17, 1896, after which it moved to Billerica Centre.

In the Centre the lodge met in the Odd Fellows' hall on River Street, the I.O.O.F. hall in Gardner Parker Hall, which it shared with Shawsheen Lodge of Odd Fellows, the Rebekahs, the Grange and other societies. The directories of 1901 and 1912 give its meetings as Tuesday on or before the full moon, and from 1916 on the second Tuesday of the month, with officers elected at the first meeting in October. Arthur S. Cook was its secretary for more than thirty years, from at least 1901 to 1931. In 1912 the magazine Billerica counted 175 members, and by 1940 there were 268. Some members who lived nearby transferred to the new lodges at Wilmington (Friendship Lodge, 1901) and Tewksbury (Wamesit Lodge, 1921).

Many of the town's officers were among its masters. After Lane came Hiram C. Brown (1892 and 1893), the blacksmith William H. Sexton (1900 and 1901), the town clerk Herbert A. King (1903 and 1904), Arthur L. Blodgett (1907 and 1908), the Howe School principal Eugene C. Vining (1911 and 1912), Dana H. Spiller (1913 and 1914), Albert H. Richardson (1915 and 1916), the town accountant Everett S. Bull (1922 and 1923), Ralph L. Dodge (1924), the Rev. J. Harold Dale (1927 and 1928), Harold E. Tivey (1935 and 1936), Newell A. Ritchie (1941 and 1942), the town moderator Charles H. Eames (1944), Fred P. Nickles (1947 and 1948) and Frederick G. Brown (1951 and 1952).

The lodge took part in the life of the town. It kept its twenty-fifth anniversary on February 22, 1915, at the Town Hall. In April 1913 the Parish Club invited it to services at the Unitarian church, the First Parish, to hear Dr. Edward H. Horton, chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate. It had a float in the parade of July 4, 1919, when the town welcomed home its soldiers and sailors of the World War, along with the Grange, the Odd Fellows and the other societies of the town.

The lodge's own building came from a gift. On December 29, 1921, Everett S. Bull, a past master, bought the old Morey store on Concord Road from Eva J. Towle and the same day deeded it to three trustees, Pearl R. Kinney, Ivory M. Hanson and George N. Sweetnam, to hold "for the benefit of said Lodge" and to manage, rent and repair it, selling or mortgaging only by vote of the lodge. For the next twenty years the store and its two tenements were rented, and the rents went to the lodge.

On February 26, 1940, Gardner Parker Hall burned (see Gardner Parker Hall Fire of 1940), leaving the lodge and the other societies that met there without a hall. Embers from the fire also set alight the tenement the lodge owned on Concord Road, which was only slightly damaged. On May 13, 1941, the lodge voted, as its secretary Leroy O. Balch certified, to transfer the Concord Road property without consideration to a new corporation, the Billerica Masonic Association, Inc., and the trustees, Edmund L. French, Edwin P. Simpson and Everett R. Brigham, deeded it to the Association on May 21, 1941. The old store was remodeled as a Masonic temple by the architect Perley F. Gilbert, who replaced most of its Victorian front, and the hall was dedicated early in 1942 in the presence of the Grand Master. At the annual town meeting of February 9, 1946, the town agreed to trade the Association a strip of land between the temple and the town hall for land behind the town hall, and the deeds were exchanged that November.

From 1942 the directories list the Masonic Hall on Concord Road, Billerica Centre, with Frederick G. Brown as custodian of the temple in 1949 and 1951 and Harold E. Tivey as the lodge's secretary from 1949 to 1957, meeting on the second Tuesday. The hall was shared. Chapter No. 212 of the Order of the Eastern Star, the Masonic body for women, had met with the lodge at Gardner Parker Hall in the 1930s; Leroy O. Balch, a member of the lodge and a Concord Road grocer, was a patron of the chapter. In 1957 the chapter met on the third Tuesday at the Masonic Hall, and the 1985 directory still lists the Billerica Order of Eastern Star at the hall. Winning Rebekah Lodge No. 108 of the Odd Fellows and the Nineteen Hundred Club also met there in 1949, 1951 and 1957. When town meeting met in 1950 the moderator announced that dinner would be served at noon at the Masonic Hall.

In its later years the lodge was known for blood drives: in the Masonic year 1988 its members gave 610 pints of blood, and town meetings announced community blood drives at the Masonic Temple on October 22, 1989, and June 24, 1990. It kept its centenary from May 7 to May 13, 1989, with an open house at the temple. With the Knights of Columbus it gave a scholarship at Billerica Memorial High School in memory of Chester Ingraham, awarded in 1991 and 1992. Among its members was the selectman Brion M. Cangiamila.

In 2020 the Billerica Historical Commission asked the town to buy the Masonic Hall with Community Preservation funds, and in June 2020 town meeting voted to do so. The Billerica Masonic Association deeded the building to the Town of Billerica on September 22, 2020, for $643,000. In 2021 the town voted further Community Preservation funds for structural repairs, estimated at about $130,000, and a study of the building's future use, and the Billerica Food Pantry moved in for a time. The lodge itself remains active in the Twelfth Masonic District, meeting on the second Tuesday of the month at the Masonic building in downtown Lowell.

Thomas Talbot Lodge, A.F. and A.M.

Thomas Talbot Lodge, A.F. and A.M.

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