The first duly constituted and chartered American lodge was St. John’s Lodge of Boston, Massachusetts. Henry Price, Provincial Grand Master of New England, constituted eighteen brethren into a lodge on July 30, 1733. They went by the name of “First Lodge” until February 7, 1783, when they changed their name to St. John’s Lodge. Massachusetts lodges are not numbered, so while St. John’s Lodge is the oldest chartered lodge, it does not have “No. 1” in its name.

Once we get past the requirement of being duly constituted, there is tantalizing evidence of earlier, unchartered lodges.

The web page for St. John’s Lodge says, “Contemporary accounts reveal that a Masonic lodge had met in King’s Chapel, Boston, as early as the 1720s (meeting according to the “old customs” ).

Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette for December 8, 1730, says “There are several Lodges of Freemasons erected in this Province.”

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania owns the unusual volume Liber B, the account book of an unchartered Pennsylvania lodge. On June 24, 1731, Benjamin (Franklin) is entered as paying dues five months back, implying lodge activity back to February 1731 or possibly December 1730, depending how you calculate five months back.

In 1734 Benjamin sent twenty-five copies of his edition of James Anderson’s The Constitutions of the Free-Masons to South Carolina. Franklin was too shrewd a businessman to send that many books on speculation, and this is a book that most appeals to active Masons. Thus we can infer a lodge was meeting in South Carolina in 1734, but the first known lodge was Solomon’s Lodge No. 1, chartered in Charleston in 1735.

Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4, Fredericksburg, Virginia, George Washington’s mother lodge, didn’t begin meeting until 1752. However, it began as a “time-immemorial” lodge and worked without a charter until 1758, when it accepted one from the Grand Lodge of Scotland. Mother Kilwinning Lodge No. 0 of Scotland is the most famous time-immemorial lodge, predating the Grand Lodge of Scotland and the granting of charters. Mother Kilwinning still works without a charter today.

(Source: The Scottish Rite Journal, May/June 2007)
Emessay Notes June 2007