Organized by Charles Haynes, who came to Texas in 1836 with the Buckeye Rangers of Ohio to fight in the Texas Revolution, the lodge was chartered in 1860 on the eve of secession. Aside from the courthouse, it displays the most use of granite and sandstone on the square. The two-story building is built mostly of regular-shaped blocks of local red sandstone, with a rock-faced finish laid in a running bond pattern. Rock-faced gray granite blocks are used for quoins, sills, lintels, stringcourses, and copings. The first story is recessed behind a granite lintel supported by two smooth granite columns on plinth blocks with capitals with volutes and Masonic symbols. The door on the left set within a rusticated granite arch supported on two polished granite columns leads to the second floor lodge rooms. The building’s stepped parapet has an Alamo-like gable framing a round window and Masonic symbols. The quality of the masonry work is exemplary.
Diagonally opposite at 100 W. Sandstone Street, the three-story Llano County Courthouse Annex was built in 1929 as the Granite City Hotel. Designed by Page Brothers, the hotel’s planar walls of dark red brick and meager cast-stone Spanish detail make it far less lively than the square’s nineteenth-century commercial architecture.