Caledonia Lodge No. 68, A. F. & A. M.

Behind the charter date are the men who made the lodge. Its 1951 centennial booklet credits Augustus Jones with the idea and the name, after his birthplace of Caledonia, Missouri, though he missed the organizing meeting of February 18, 1850 and was not a member at the 1851 charter. Those who came included the castle builder Robert Robson, the land speculator Robert Hardin Tobin, Asa Townsend and J. W. E. Wallace. The lodge first bought property in Columbus on September 21, 1853. In 1916 its Master was Joseph V. Frnka, later a legislator and war crimes judge.

What the plaque says

Caledonia Lodge No. 68, A. F. & A. M. Organized 1850; chartered Jan. 24, 1851; on Feb. 3, 1851, founded Columbus Female Seminary, first educational institution in Columbus. Built 2-story structure to house school downstairs, lodge hall above. Also (1857) founded Colorado College, city's first public school. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Columbus — steps away
• The Colorado County Citizen — steps away
• The Rangers of Austin's Colony — steps away
• Tumlinson Family — steps away