Masonic Lodge Building

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Masonic Lodge Building in Henderson, Rusk County. Now settle in, because this story starts before Texas was even a state. Clinton Lodge No. 23, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, received its charter in 1845, back when Texas was still its own independent republic.

That's a detail worth letting sit for a moment. An independent republic. And this lodge was already holding meetings, already doing its work.

By the time the building they'd eventually call home was even a glint in anybody's eye, this lodge had been around long enough to have a history of its own. Then comes 1884. That's when S.

M. and J. H. Mims put up the building we're talkin' about right now.

A fine two-story structure in Henderson's downtown. The Masons didn't own it yet, mind you. That came later, in 1893, when Clinton Lodge No. 23 purchased the building outright.

Once they did, they claimed the second floor for their meetings and held it for decades, right up through 1936, when they built themselves a new lodge hall and moved on. But here's where the story gets a little layered. While the Masons were gatherin' upstairs all those years, the first floor had a life of its own.

It was leased to a grocery store for thirty years. Thirty years of flour sacks and canned goods and neighbors runnin' tabs. And then, from 1936 to 1971, that same ground floor became the Wright Drug Store.

Soda fountains, prescriptions, the particular smell of a place where a whole town comes to feel a little better. Different purposes, different eras, same walls. That building has held meetings of ancient fraternal tradition on one floor and the everyday commerce of a community on another, across generations and through the better part of a century.

The marker says it plainly: this structure remains an important element of Henderson's downtown commercial history. And after a story like that, it's hard to argue otherwise.

What the marker says

Constructed in 1884 by S. M. and J. H. Mims, this building was purchased in 1893 by Clinton Lodge No. 23, A. F. & A. M., which had been chartered in 1845 when Texas was an independent republic. The Masons conducted meetings on the second floor of the building until 1936, when they built a new lodge hall. The first floor of this structure was leased to a grocery store for thirty years, and from 1936 to 1971 it was the site of the Wright Drug Store. The structure remains an important element of Henderson's downtown commercial history.