In 1863, Henry Moore Teller served simultaneously as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Colorado and as a Major General of the Colorado militia. He was 32 years old, had arrived in the territory only two years earlier as a lawyer, and had already made himself indispensable to its civic and fraternal life. The two tracks ran together, not in parallel. He would go on to become one of Colorado's first two United States Senators, to serve as Secretary of the Interior in President Chester Arthur's cabinet, and to hold a Senate seat for five terms across thirty-three years. Colorado named a county for him in 1899 while he was still living. He was also, for much of his career, the most significant Masonic figure the state had yet produced — and those facts are not unrelated.
Teller is the clearest documented example of something that was common in early Colorado: the overlap between Masonic leadership and civic leadership was not coincidental. It was structural. The same values the fraternity emphasized — integrity, obligation to the community, the willingness to hold oneself to a standard — were the qualities frontier society most needed in its leaders. The men who organized the lodge were, very often, the men who organized everything else.
The Builder
Frank E. Edbrooke, whose temple on Welton Street has been the subject of an earlier post in this series, represents a different dimension of Colorado's Masonic tradition: the man who built the physical fabric of the state. Edbrooke designed more than seventy buildings in Colorado, including the Brown Palace Hotel, the Oxford Hotel, and the Masonic Temple itself. He designed the Colorado State Capitol's interior finishing work and his own mausoleum at Fairmount Cemetery. He was a Mason who built the lodge he belonged to, a craftsman who took his Masonic obligation to "truth and honesty in all things" as the guiding principle of his professional life. His buildings are among the best evidence that he meant it.
The Pattern
The Colorado Masonic record from the territory and early statehood years includes a range of men who shaped the state. Among those recorded in lodge histories and Colorado historical sources: Horace Tabor, the Leadville silver king who briefly served as United States Senator and whose fortune funded some of Denver's most recognizable civic buildings, including the Tabor Opera House; Henry C. Brown, the Denver developer who commissioned the Brown Palace Hotel and whose real estate dealings shaped the city's central district; and James B. Grant, who served as Colorado's third governor and was one of the state's leading figures in the silver mining industry.
These men are not exceptions to a pattern. They are the pattern. In Colorado's formative decades, the lodge was one of the few institutions that functioned as a reliable network of trust across the distances and rough conditions of frontier life. Men who needed to extend credit, form business partnerships, organize civic projects, or find reliable allies in an unfamiliar territory used the fraternal bond as a proxy for character. The lodge was, in practical terms, a trust infrastructure for a society that had not yet built its formal institutions.
The Centennial Moment
Colorado became a state in August 1876, the centennial year of American independence. The Grand Lodge of Colorado had existed for fifteen years by then; it had already laid cornerstones for major public buildings and seen its lodges spread across the mining communities of the Rocky Mountains. The men who chartered Centennial Lodge No. 84 — the lodge whose number places it in those early years of statehood — were the contemporaries of Teller, of Edbrooke, of the builders and lawmakers who made Colorado what it became.
Centennial Lodge No. 84's name is not merely decorative. The lodge was named at a moment when the centennial of American independence was also Colorado's founding moment as a state, and Freemasonry had been part of Colorado's story since before either milestone. The men who built this lodge were building something in a tradition that included Senators and architects, lawmakers and stonemasons, men whose names are on county borders and hotel facades and whose fraternal obligations shaped how they did the work.
That tradition continues. The lodge room on Welton Street is the same room where those men met. The work is the same work.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Grand Lodge of Colorado profile — gwmemorial.org
Colorado Encyclopedia, Henry Teller — coloradoencyclopedia.org
Colorado Encyclopedia, Frank E. Edbrooke — coloradoencyclopedia.org
History Colorado, Strings of Stone — historycolorado.org
Grand Lodge of Colorado A.F. & A.M. — coloradofreemasons.org