The Roots of Freemasonry

As the Reformation reshaped Europe in the 16th century, Masonic lodges began admitting men who were not practicing stonemasons — nobles, scholars, and professionals drawn to the tradition of craft brotherhood and its symbolic vocabulary. This shift from operative to speculative masonry was gradual and not uniform across Scotland and England.

In Scotland, William Schaw, appointed Master of Works to King James VI, issued the First Schaw Statutes in 1598 and the Second Schaw Statutes in 1599, formalizing lodge governance, officer roles, and standards of craft knowledge. The Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel) No. 1 was established as the preeminent lodge under this framework.

Notable early admissions of non-operative members include John Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, who entered the Lodge of Edinburgh in 1600. In England, Sir Robert Moray was made a Mason in 1641 at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Elias Ashmole — antiquarian and founder of the Ashmolean Museum — was recorded joining a lodge in Warrington, Lancashire, in 1646. By the end of the 17th century, London and Scottish lodges were increasingly composed of “accepted” non-operative members, and the emphasis had shifted from building craft to moral philosophy.

On June 24, 1717 — St. John the Baptist’s Day — delegates from four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse near St. Paul’s Cathedral and formed the Premier Grand Lodge of England, the first grand lodge in the world. Anthony Sayer was elected inaugural Grand Master. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a clergyman and Fellow of the Royal Society, served as Grand Master in 1719 and did much to shape the structure and ritual of the emerging institution.

The Rev. James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons, published in 1723 and commissioned by the Grand Lodge, established written regulations and a legendary history tracing the craft to biblical antiquity. It became the foundational document of Freemasonry worldwide. Ireland established its Grand Lodge in Dublin around 1725; Scotland followed in Edinburgh in 1736.

A rival body — the Antients Grand Lodge — was founded in London in 1751 by Irish and Scottish Masons who felt the Moderns had departed from original ritual practice. Laurence Dermott’s Ahiman Rezon (1756) laid out their position. The division ended on December 27, 1813, when the two bodies merged at Freemasons’ Hall in London to form the United Grand Lodge of England, under the Duke of Sussex as Grand Master.

Freemasonry spread internationally through British military lodges, merchant networks, and colonial administration. France saw its first lodges around 1728. The Grand Orient de France was established in Paris in 1773. Chevalier Ramsay’s 1737 oration in Paris connected the order to the Crusading Knights Hospitaller, inspiring a wave of additional degrees and Masonic bodies across Europe.

In 1826, William Morgan of Batavia, New York, disappeared after announcing his intention to publish an exposé of Masonic ritual. His fate was never conclusively established, but the episode fueled a sustained anti-Masonic movement that produced a third American political party and significantly reduced lodge membership across the Northeast during the 1830s.

Masonic activity in the American colonies predates the 1717 founding of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. John Moore, Collector for the Port of Pennsylvania, wrote of attending Masonic gatherings in Philadelphia as early as 1715. In 1730, the Grand Lodge of England appointed Daniel Coxe as Provincial Grand Master for North America, enabling the formal chartering of lodges across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. The first fully warranted lodge in the colonies — St. John’s Lodge in Boston — received its English charter in 1733 under Henry Price.

Benjamin Franklin joined a Philadelphia lodge in 1731 and served as Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734. George Washington was initiated at Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 in Virginia on November 4, 1752, and raised as a Master Mason the following year. By the time of the Revolution, more than 100 lodges were operating across the colonies under charters from English, Irish, or Scottish grand lodges. At least nine signers of the Declaration of Independence and thirteen signers of the Constitution were Freemasons of record.

After independence, the provincial structure gave way to independent state grand lodges — one per state, a federated model that mirrors the constitutional structure of the republic. Virginia organized the first independent state grand lodge in 1778. A proposal to create an overarching national grand lodge, with Washington as its potential head, was put forward and rejected: the state grand lodges were unwilling to subordinate their authority. By 1800, eleven state grand lodges governed 347 subordinate lodges and approximately 16,000 members.

The Morgan affair of 1826 triggered a sharp contraction — membership fell from roughly 100,000 American Masons to under 40,000 by the mid-1830s. The fraternity recovered through the latter half of the 19th century and surged in what historians have called the “Golden Age of Fraternalism,” roughly 1870 to 1920, when lodge membership grew alongside a broader American culture of fraternal organization. As the country expanded westward, Freemasonry moved with it: Masons arrived in new territories ahead of statehood, organized under dispensation from neighboring grand lodges, and eventually established independent grand lodges as territories became states.

Prince Hall Freemasonry has its roots in the deliberate exclusion of Black men from mainstream American lodges. Prince Hall (c. 1735–1807), a free Black leader and abolitionist in Boston, and fourteen other free Black men petitioned for admission to the city’s St. John’s Lodge before the American Revolution. They were refused.

In 1775, Hall and his associates were instead initiated into a lodge attached to the 38th British Foot Infantry, meeting under a Grand Lodge of Ireland charter at Castle William Island in Boston Harbor. When the regiment departed at the start of the Revolution, it left them with only a permit to conduct Masonic funeral processions.

In March 1784, Hall petitioned the Premier Grand Lodge of England directly for a full charter. The charter was issued on September 29, 1784, authorizing African Lodge No. 459 in Boston — signed under the authority of H.R.H. The Duke of Cumberland, Grand Master. Due to delays in arranging delivery and fees, the warrant did not reach Boston until April 29, 1787, carried by Captain James Scott. African Lodge No. 459 formally organized and began work on May 6, 1787. It remains the only charter known to exist in America issued by the Grand Lodge of England.

Hall went on to establish subsidiary lodges in Philadelphia and Providence, Rhode Island, in 1797. He was appointed Provincial Grand Master in 1791. Following his death in December 1807, the three lodges met in December 1808 and formed the African Grand Lodge. In 1827, the lodge declared itself an independent grand lodge; by 1847 it was renamed the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in his honor.

Today Prince Hall Grand Lodges operate in all 50 states and several international jurisdictions, with more than 300,000 initiated members in the United States. Both the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts and, where mutual recognition compacts exist, Prince Hall grand lodges across the country are recognized by the United Grand Lodge of England — including, since 1991, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado.

The first Masonic gathering on Colorado soil took place on the evening of November 3, 1858, in a tent at the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River in the settlement of Auraria — before any church or school had been established in the territory. Seven Masons were present, meeting informally for mutual support. By December 27, 1858, twenty-six Masons celebrated the Feast of St. John the Evangelist together in Auraria.

Formal organization followed. The Grand Lodge of Kansas granted a dispensation to Auraria Lodge U.D. on August 15, 1859, and the lodge held its first official meeting on October 1 of that year. Separately, in the mountains, Masons constructed Colorado’s first Masonic hall — a log cabin in Central City — on June 15, 1859. Additional lodges received charters from the Grand Lodge of Nebraska: Summit Lodge No. 7 at Parkville and Rocky Mountain Lodge No. 8 at Gold Hill.

On August 2–3, 1861, representatives of three lodges convened in Golden City and formed the Grand Lodge of Colorado — Golden City Lodge No. 34 (chartered by Kansas), Summit Lodge No. 7, and Rocky Mountain Lodge No. 8 (both chartered by Nebraska). John Chivington was elected the first Grand Master. Colorado would not achieve statehood for another fifteen years, but its Masonic Grand Lodge was already sovereign and functioning, chartered by the fraternity before the state was created by Congress.

From those three founding lodges, the Grand Lodge of Colorado grew to govern over 100 active lodges across the state today. A full account of Colorado Masonic history is available on our Colorado Masonic History page.

Freemasonry reached its peak membership in America between 1870 and 1920, driven by social networks and a culture of fraternal belonging. Colonial expansion carried the Craft to India, Australia, and further abroad, initially serving expatriate communities before wider local membership developed.

London’s Freemasons’ Hall, built between 1927 and 1933, stands as a memorial to the more than 3,000 members of the United Grand Lodge who died in the First World War. Suppression followed in Fascist Italy after 1925, Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 — when lodges were shuttered and members imprisoned — and throughout Soviet-controlled territories from 1917 onward.

Membership rebounded in the postwar decades in the United States and Britain, then declined again through the late 20th century as cultural patterns shifted. The Duke of Kent has served as Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England since 1967. In 2017, the UGLE marked its 300th anniversary with international gatherings, including a major ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Worldwide membership today is estimated at between two and six million, with considerable variation by jurisdiction.