Lynnteresting!

Little-known, interesting tidbits about this great city’s amazing history.

Lynn’s Hidden Secrets

As if it was some recently discovered lost footage from the movie “National Treasure,” some heavy, dusty, leather volumes have recently resurfaced: the original records of the earliest organization of Masons in Lynn, covering its story from its creation in 1805 and throughout its existence in the nineteenth century. These ancient volumes tell, in part, of how a secret society in Lynn of long ago had its time of having to go underground, although not literally like in the movie.

In the mid-1830s, decades of suspicion and distrust of the Masons had grown into a nationwide outcry to expose and defeat the organization and their secrets. Anti-masons claimed that Masons were a brotherhood of judges, bankers, merchants, and professionals who were secretly bound together to favor each other. In 1829 the citizens of Lynn voted in town meeting that Freemasonry was “a great moral evil … and dangerous to all free government.”  Along with most other lodges, Lynn’s Mount Carmel Lodge of Masons (the first Masonic lodge in Lynn) avoided the harassment and threats of the anti-masons by going underground. They surrendered their charter in 1833 and discontinued their meetings, but about a dozen of the brethren continued to meet clandestinely in secluded spots around Lynn as opportunity presented and weather permitted.

Sometimes they met on Long Beach, about half way between Lynn and Nahant. Sentinels would be posted at suitable distances in either direction so that the meetings would not be interrupted by interlopers and eavesdroppers. On such occasions the faithful few would open a lodge meeting in due form and rehearse the ritual that it might remain fresh in their memories against the time when they could safely reorganize the lodge. At other times they met on the summit of High Rock, then a barren pasture with no dwellings in the near vicinity. When the winter months came and the cold weather prohibited out of door meetings, they gathered at the residence of one or another of the brethren, sometimes meeting in the kitchen and sometimes in a small upper chamber. And in order that the brethren might hold these meetings in secret, the good wife would take her sewing and spend the evening with some neighbor. The notices of these meetings were passed by word of mouth from brother to brother, and on the appointed evening they would repair separately to the designated place, that they might not attract the attention or excite the curiosity of the uninitiated.

The lodge’s records stopped on 16 December 1834 and then resumed when the Mount Carmel Lodge was restored on 11 June 1845. Years after the decade of silence, a member related in the gap left in the records how the Masonic rights were kept alive in Lynn during the persecution.

Secret societies reemerged into the light of day and multiplied throughout Lynn for the remainder of the century, symbols of brotherhood and belonging, virtues and aspiring visions; only the devoted few would remember the dark days when they had to huddle together on a cold, windy stretch of beach, reciting words in hushed tones and practicing ceremonial gestures while looking over each other’s shoulders into the dusk, watching warily lest their secrets be discovered.