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Prince Hall Masonic Lodge and Order of the Eastern Star

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1904. 602 East Broad St.

This prominent classicizing two-story brown brick and terracotta lodge, divided into five bays by simple pilaster strips, represents the foundation of African American Freemasonry in Savannah. Due to segregation, Prince Hall, an immigrant from Barbados to Boston, Massachusetts, along with about fourteen African Americans, were denied admission to existing lodges in that city. They applied to the Grand Lodge of England to establish their own lodge, and the first African Lodge was chartered in Boston in 1784. After the Reverend J. M. Simms, a black Baptist minister from Savannah who had moved to Boston and become a Mason, returned in 1870 as a District Deputy Grand Master, he established this lodge, incorporating the Order of Eastern Star for African American women in 1898.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Robin B. Williams with David Gobel, Patrick Haughey, Daves Rossell, and Karl Schuler
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Data

What's Nearby

King-Tisdell Cottage
St. John Baptist Church
St. Benedict the Moor Church
The Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation, SCAD (Orphanage and Convent for the Missionary Sisters of the Franciscan Order)
Houses

Citation

Robin B. Williams with David Gobel, Patrick Haughey, Daves Rossell, and Karl Schuler, "Prince Hall Masonic Lodge and Order of the Eastern Star", [Savannah, Georgia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/GA-02-9.11.

Print Source

Buildings of Savannah, Robin B. Williams. With David Gobel, Patrick Haughey, Daves Rossell, and Karl Schuler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016, 176-176.

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