Ashley Lodge No. 681, A. F. & A. M.

Bailey owes its name to a quarrel. Two doctors, Josiah S. Bailey and A. J. Ray, owned the land that became the townsite, and each wanted the town named for himself. The Handbook of Texas says the dispute ended in 1885, when the St. Louis Southwestern Railway used right-of-way that Bailey had donated. A post office branch opened two years later, and the railroad fed about twenty years of growth. The Handbook adds that the town did not incorporate until 1933, nearly half a century after the right-of-way deal.

What the plaque says

Ashley Lodge No. 681, A. F. & A. M. Chartered on December 12, 1889, this was the seventh Masonic lodge organized in Fannin County. The first official meeting occurred in January 1890, in a two-story frame building which the lodge shared with the Baptist church. In 1912 the lodge purchased a separate building in downtown Bailey. The second floor was reserved for lodge meetings, while the first floor was leased to a variety of retail businesses. That structure burned in 1950, and Ashley Lodge members met in the Grove Hill Lodge in Leonard until a new building was completed in 1952. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 9.9 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 22 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 30 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 32 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Bailey — steps away
• Portland — 1.4 mi
• Joseph F. Fenner — 3.1 mi
• Grove Hill — 3.1 mi