Reagan Masonic Lodge No. 1037 A. F. & A. M.

Two of the youth orders the plaque says the lodge fostered were barely older than its own chapters. The Order of DeMolay began at the Scottish Rite Temple in Kansas City on March 24, 1919, when thirty-one high school boys met with Frank S. Land as their adviser; they took the name of Jacques DeMolay, last leader of the Knights Templar. DeMolay's example led the Rev. W. Mark Sexson, a Mason in McAlester, Oklahoma, to found the Order of the Rainbow for Girls on April 6, 1922. He wrote its first ritual, and its charter class numbered 171.

What the plaque says

Reagan Masonic Lodge No. 1037 A. F. & A. M. Reagan Lodge, the first Masonic Lodge instituted in the Houston suburbs, marked the beginning of the second wave of Houston Masonic Lodges and accompanied a major surge in the growth of the city and the birth of its suburbs. The lodge was chartered in the municipality of Houston Heights on December 12, 1910; its first meeting was held on December 31, 1910. The lodge was named for Mason John Henninger Reagan (1818-1905), who served as a judge, Confederate Postmaster General, U.S. Congressman and Senator, framer of the 1876 Texas Constitution, and first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission. Within its first twelve years, the lodge facilitated the formation of Chapters of the Order of the Eastern Star, Order of Demolay for Boys and Order of Rainbow for Girls. Three area schools have been named for lodge members. The lodge's first regular meetings were held in a rented space in the 900 block of Yale St. An association was formed in 1912 to raise money for a new, permanent lodge building, which was constructed in 1930 at the northeast corner of Harvard St. and Eleventh Ave., but was taken over by a local bank in 1935 as a result of the Great Depression. The lodge met at a temporary site until the completion of the lodge building at the northeast corner of Heights Blvd. and Sixteenth Ave. in 1948. The building was designed by architect and Houston Heights resident L.R. Hayes, who was also Master of Reagan Lodge 1937-1938. Reagan Masonic Lodge has a long history of charitable work and philanthropic endeavors and continues to be a civic leader in the Houston Heights community. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 3.2 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 4.3 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 4.3 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 4.6 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Heights Church of Christ — steps away
• Daniel Denton Cooley — steps away
• St. Andrew's Episcopal Church — steps away
• Cooley School — 0.2 mi