Clandestine Masonry

Scope and Contents

Collection includes letters, telegrams, subpoenaes related to a fraud trial known as the American Masonic Federation Fraud trial or the Thomson Masonic Fraud trial. The majority of the papers are from 1922 and 1923, with one document dated to 1915.

Scope and Contents

Charter for a Templar Lodge authorized by a Grand Lodge in New York. The lodge and grand lodge are clandestine, not regular. Henry Atwood is named as Grand Master and Daniel Sickels as Senior Grand Warden of the St. John's Grand Lodge of New York.

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Circular of St. John's Grand Lodge, New York signed (printed) by Robert Macoy, Grand Secretary. It concerns arbitration between Grand Lodge of New York and St. John's Grand Lodge, New York, specifically holding Masonic funerals and also regards the accusation that St. John's Grand Lodge is composed of clandestine Masons.

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Circular to Lodges in Michigan from Lodges in Illinois concerns the illigitimate body formed in Kalamazoo, Michigan, pretending to be Scottish Rite.

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Circulars sent out from the Office of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania that issued a warning to all Pennsylvania Masons would have been involved with Cerneau bodies to sever the relationship

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Knight of Rose Croix Masonic certificate given to Pierre Benjamain Baullier by les Amis Indivisibles of the Orient of Paris. Symbols on the certificate include a cross with a rose and a broken column.

Scope and Contents Correspondence includes a typescript letter to Harvey Newton Brown from Grand Master Charles R. Bonnefort. Letter concerns Brown's affiliation with Anglo-Saxon Lodge, No. 343, in Texas which was chartered by the Grande Loge de France. G. M. Bonnemort explained that this membership constitutes affiliation with a clandestine lodge and is a violation of his obligation to Masons in Rhode Island (Brown is also a member of Berlin Lodge No. 46 of Rhode Island). Also includes the response of Harvey...

Scope and Contents A clandestine Master Mason certificate issued by Lodge Sobieski, No. 134 (Elizabeth, New Jersey), to John Kulczycki and dated 1921. Lodge Sobieski, No. 134, was a Masonic body within Matthew McBlaine Thomson's International Masonic Federation, a later incarnation of Thomson's American Masonic Federation, a clandestine Masonic organization whose leaders were convicted at Salt Lake City, Utah, on May 5, 1922, on ten counts of mail fraud. Thomson's International Masonic Federation also used the...

Scope and Contents

Certificate is from a clandestine lodge. Massachusetts' lodges do not have numbers and do not reference "the Grand Lodge of the United States of America".