DUANE
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Duane's take
The way I tell it, I'm drawing straight from the official marker for Rising Star Lodge Number Four Twenty-Nine, A.F. and A.M., right here in Kerr County. Now, some stories begin with a founding, and some begin with a fire. This one has both, and you're going to want to hear them in order.
On June the fifth, 1875, Rising Star Lodge Number Four Twenty-Nine was chartered. Fifteen men put their names to that moment, and those names deserve to be said out loud. Miles A.
Lowrance. Joshua D. Brown.
William D. C. Burney.
H. B. Dollahite.
Alonzo Rees. A. S.
Moore. John F. Moore.
Sidney B. Rees. Theodore Wiedenfeld.
Stephen G. Wray. George W.
Wools. James M. Witt.
Samuel H. Wellborn. F.
M. Moore. And Thomas C.
North. Fifteen charter members. Fifteen men who decided this corner of Texas needed a lodge, and so they built one.
And they did build one. A real building, with walls and a roof and, most importantly, records. Every meeting logged, every name written down, every bit of institutional memory a lodge accumulates across twenty-five years of handshakes and ceremony.
Then came 1900. The building burned. And with it, every last one of those records.
Gone. The work of a quarter century, turned to ash. If a lodge can be said to lose its memory, that fire was it.
But here is the thing about Rising Star Lodge. It did not stop meeting. It found the Guadalupe Valley Bank building, and from 1902, that is where the brothers gathered.
Year after year, meeting after meeting, they kept the lodge alive in borrowed space. That went on until 1964, when the lodge finally moved to this very site. A permanent home, at last, for a lodge that had already proven it could survive just about anything.
Fifteen names on a charter in 1875. A fire that took everything in 1900. Decades of meetings in a bank building.
And then, finally, a place to call their own. Rising Star Lodge Number Four Twenty-Nine. Still rising.
What the marker says
Chartered on June 5, 1875, this lodge was first located in a building which was destroyed by fire in 1900, along with all the lodge records. Meetings were held in the Guadalupe Valley Bank building from 1902 until the lodge moved to this site in 1964. Charter members of the lodge were: Miles A. Lowrance, Joshua D. Brown, William D. C. Burney, H. B. Dollahite, Alonzo Rees, A. S. Moore, John F. Moore, Sidney B. Rees, Theodore Wiedenfeld, Stephen G. Wray, George W. Wools, James M. Witt, Samuel H. Wellborn, F. M. Moore, and Thomas C. North. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986