On the evening of November 3, 1858, seven men gathered somewhere in the frontier settlement of Auraria — a rough camp at the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River — and held the first Masonic meeting in what would become Colorado. No building is recorded. No address survives. The men were gold-seekers, most of them, and whatever space they occupied that night was almost certainly temporary. Seven men, a set of fraternal obligations that predated the country they were in, and the intention to build something that would last.
More than 165 years later, Freemasonry occupies a permanent address in the heart of downtown Denver, one block from the 16th Street Mall. The institution that began in those makeshift quarters has, by any measure, outlasted the camp, the territory, the silver boom, the silver crash, two world wars, a catastrophic fire, and the full arc of Denver's transformation from frontier outpost to major American city. That continuity is worth understanding.
The Founding Seven
The names of the men in that first meeting are known: Dr. Levi Russell, Henry Allen, W.M. Slaughter, Oscar Lehow, Andrew Sagendorf, J.D. Ramage, and Charles Blake. They received dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Kansas in October 1859 to meet formally as Auraria Lodge. By August 1861 — fifteen years before Colorado statehood — they and their successors had formed a Grand Lodge of their own. In December of that year, Auraria Lodge was rechartered under a new name: Denver Lodge No. 5, which meets at 1614 Welton Street to this day.
The number carries its own history. Denver Lodge No. 5 was among the first lodges chartered in the new Grand Lodge of Colorado — a founding member of the institution it still belongs to, with records running unbroken back to that tent in Auraria.
Building the City
As Denver grew, so did the Masonic presence in its built environment. The fraternity did not merely meet in the city; it helped consecrate its major institutions. Denver Lodge No. 5 participated in cornerstone ceremonies at Union Depot in 1870 and at the University of Colorado in 1875. The Grand Lodge of Colorado laid the cornerstone of the Colorado State Capitol on July 4, 1890 — using the same ancient Masonic ceremony that George Washington had used at the U.S. Capitol less than a century before. By the turn of the twentieth century, Masonic symbols and cornerstones appeared on hundreds of Colorado's public buildings: courthouses, libraries, schools, government offices.
This was not incidental. The fraternity's tradition of marking civic buildings with its ceremonies was a statement about the relationship between the Craft and the community it served. The men who built Colorado's public institutions were often the same men who met in lodge, and the cornerstones they laid were their signature on the work.
Boom, Crash, and Resilience
The silver boom of the 1870s and 1880s sent Masonic lodges spreading across the Colorado mountains. Leadville, at its peak briefly rivaling Denver in population, had one of the largest lodges in the state. Aspen, Central City, Black Hawk — every significant mining community had a lodge, often meeting before there was a proper building to hold it in.
The silver crash of 1893 tested all of it. The collapse in silver prices wiped out fortunes, shuttered mines, and hollowed out communities across the state. Many mountain lodges lost members, struggled for quorum, or went dark entirely. The Scottish Rite bodies in Denver, which had raised $50,000 to purchase a church building at 19th and Welton Streets in 1891 as their headquarters, lost it to mortgage foreclosure in the panic of 1893. What the crash revealed was a distinction between the lodges tied to the mining economy and the institutions rooted in the communities that survived it. Denver's lodges weathered the 1890s. The work continued.
The Second Landmark
The Scottish Rite returned. After purchasing land near the State Capitol in 1909 and waiting more than a decade for the membership and resources to proceed, the Scottish Rite bodies broke ground for their new temple in 1922. Designed by Denver architect William Norman Bowman — himself a Scottish Rite Mason — the building was completed and dedicated on May 14, 1925. It stands today at 14th Avenue and Grant Street, diagonally across from the State Capitol: a Neoclassical building with a distinctive dome, its western pediment crowned by a double-headed eagle bearing the number 32. It is one of two major Masonic landmarks in downtown Denver. The other is at 1614 Welton Street.
The Long View
The Welton Street temple has now stood for well over a century — through the silver crash, two world wars, the mid-twentieth-century membership decline that affected fraternal organizations across America, and a 1984 arson fire that gutted its interior but left its Manitou sandstone walls standing. Each time, the institution recovered and the work resumed.
Denver is not unique in having a Masonic past. What is notable is the degree to which that past is physically present. More than a hundred Masonic lodges remain active across Colorado. The fraternity's mark is on the State Capitol, on the University of Colorado's founding, on hundreds of buildings across the state. The address at 1614 Welton Street has been occupied continuously by working lodges since 1890.
Centennial Lodge No. 84 is part of that continuity. The lodge's number places it in Colorado's early decades; its meeting hall sits on the 16th Street Mall in the building those founding lodges built and fought to keep. The men who gathered in a tent in Auraria in 1858 would recognize the institution that still meets at that address. The fraternity they started has held its ground.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Grand Lodge of Colorado profile — gwmemorial.org
Denver Lodge No. 5 A.F. & A.M., Lodge History — denver5.org/history
Denver Architecture Foundation, Scottish Rite Masonic Center — denverarchitecture.org
History Colorado, Strings of Stone — historycolorado.org
Grand Lodge of Colorado A.F. & A.M. — coloradofreemasons.org
Wikipedia, Grand Lodge of Colorado — en.wikipedia.org