Rising Star Lodge No. 429, A.F. & A.M.

Before 1900 most Texas Masonic charity went to schooling. The Grand Lodge set up an education fund in 1847 and named a superintendent of education the next year. Between 1850 and 1873 the legislature chartered seventeen Masonic-sponsored schools, and Masons helped start more than 100 other schools without charters. Many early public schools first met in lodge buildings. After the hard years following the Civil War, prosperity returned, and by 1878, three years after Rising Star's charter, the Grand Lodge was solvent and Texas membership had reached 17,000.

What the plaque says

Rising Star Lodge No. 429, A.F. & A.M. Chartered on June 5, 1875, this lodge was first located in a building which was destroyed by fire in 1900, along with all the lodge records. Meetings were held in the Guadalupe Valley Bank building from 1902 until the lodge moved to this site in 1964. Charter members of the lodge were: Miles A. Lowrance, Joshua D. Brown, William D. C. Burney, H. B. Dollahite, Alonzo Rees, A. S. Moore, John F. Moore, Sidney B. Rees, Theodore Wiedenfeld, Stephen G. Wray, George W. Wools, James M. Witt, Samuel H. Wellborn, F. M. Moore, and Thomas C. North. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — 7.6 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Schreiner Mansion — 9.3 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Frontier Times Museum — 15 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 17 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.

More markers nearby

• Center Point United Methodist Church — steps away
• Center Point Christian Church — 0.3 mi
• Center Point School — 0.3 mi
• Site of Zanzenberg — 0.5 mi