Garland Lodge No. 441, A.F. & A.M.

The lodge's neighbors were the Grange and the school. The Handbook of Texas says Duck Creek's permission to form a Masonic lodge came on September 19, 1873, and its charter on June 7, 1875. In 1880 a new one-room school was built, and the Masonic and Grange Hall was moved to it and added on as a wing. The Grange's Duck Creek Co-operative Association store is said to have been the village's largest business until it closed in March 1887. By 1892 Garland's Masons, Odd Fellows and Knights of Honor each had a hall.

What the plaque says

Garland Lodge No. 441, A.F. & A.M. In 1873 the Grand Lodge of Texas granted Masons in the pioneer community of Duck Creek (present day Garland) dispensation to form their own lodge. The first Lodge hall, which the Masons shared with two other organizations, was destroyed in a windstorm in 1874. Duck Creek Lodge No. 441 was issued a permanent charter in 1875. In 1876, after 20 months of meeting in a schoolhouse, church, and in the homes of several of its members, the Lodge met in a new hall built on land in Duck Creek donated by John and Elisa Wallace. The merger of the villages of Duck Creek and nearby Embree in the late 1880s to form Garland prompted the Lodge leadership to relocate its hall to the corner of present day Glenbrook and Main Street in 1889. Membership in the Lodge continued to grow and in 1897 a new brick lodge hall was constructed at the northwest corner of Garland's downtown square. In 1903 the name of the Lodge was changed to Garland Lodge No. 441. A new Lodge hall was built at this site in 1960. This Lodge has a long history of charitable work in the community, and has counted among its members ten former mayors of Garland and many other business, civic, military and political leaders. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 11 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 12 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 12 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• Garland — 0.5 mi
• First Christian Church of Garland — 0.6 mi
• First Methodist Church of Garland — 0.7 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Garland — 0.7 mi