On January 17, 1876, a group of Black Masons met in Denver and formed the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado. The state of Colorado would not formally come into existence until seven months later, in August of that year. Two Grand Lodges. One founding year. That coincidence is not accidental, and it is not incidental. It is part of the story.
The Origin
Prince Hall Freemasonry traces its beginnings to March 6, 1775 — seven months before the first shots of the American Revolution — when Prince Hall and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by a lodge attached to a British regiment stationed in Boston. They were not welcomed into the existing Boston lodges, which turned them away. They built their own.
In 1784, Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England for a formal charter. It was granted. African Lodge No. 459 of Boston became the mother lodge of what would eventually be called Prince Hall Freemasonry — a body that traced its charter directly to the same English authority that had chartered the colonial lodges that would become the mainstream American fraternity. The legitimacy of that charter was clear. The American fraternity's willingness to acknowledge it was another matter, and that matter would not be resolved for more than two centuries.
The Colorado Story
Prince Hall Masonry reached Colorado through a chain of dispensations that moved steadily westward following the Civil War: from Massachusetts, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas, arriving in Colorado in 1867. On November 17 of that year, Rocky Mountain Lodge No. 1 was organized in Denver under the Kansas jurisdiction — the first Prince Hall lodge in Colorado.
By January 1876, enough lodges were established to form a Grand Lodge. The Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado was constituted on January 17, 1876. One of the lodges formed the following day, January 18, was Centennial Lodge No. 4 — named, like the state that was about to be admitted to the Union, for the centennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Two fraternal bodies, both organized in Denver, both using the word "centennial" to honor that same founding moment, one chartered under the mainstream Grand Lodge and one under the Prince Hall Grand Lodge, separated by the color line that divided American Masonry as it divided American society.
The Exclusion
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mainstream Grand Lodge of Colorado — like virtually every other mainstream American grand lodge — declined to recognize the Prince Hall Grand Lodge as legitimate. The official rationale was that Prince Hall lodges were "clandestine" — a Masonic term meaning irregular or unrecognized. The practical reality was that this designation was racial in origin and racial in application — sustained, for generations, by men who opened every lodge meeting on the principle that all men meet upon the level.
This is a fact that the mainstream American Masonic tradition has, in recent decades, acknowledged plainly. The fraternity that proclaimed all men equal in lodge — that built its foundational principles around meeting on the level — maintained a racial separation in practice that directly contradicted those principles for well over a century. The Prince Hall fraternity, meanwhile, continued to confer degrees, build lodges, and do the work of Freemasonry in communities across the country, holding the same traditions, practicing the same ritual, and honoring the same obligations as the lodges that refused to recognize them.
Recognition
The process of recognition began in earnest in 1989, when the Grand Lodge of Connecticut became the first mainstream American grand lodge to formally recognize a Prince Hall grand lodge. Nebraska followed within weeks. The movement spread.
In Colorado, Grand Master Donald P. Smith appointed a special committee on April 3, 1990, to study the origins, history, and Masonic legitimacy of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado. Recognition followed. The two Grand Lodges, which had existed in the same state since 1876, entered into a formal compact — a mutual recognition that acknowledged both as regular, legitimate Masonic bodies.
On October 19, 2022, the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado and the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Colorado came together at the Colorado State Capitol to renew that compact — a public rededication, in the building whose cornerstone the mainstream Grand Lodge had laid in 1890, of the fraternal relationship between two bodies that had finally recognized what their shared principles had always required.
Where Things Stand
The Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado and Its Jurisdiction serves Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. In 2026 — the year of Colorado's 150th anniversary as a state and the nation's 250th anniversary — the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado celebrates its own 150th anniversary, the same centennial milestone as the state it helped build. Its lodges have been meeting in Denver and across Colorado since 1867.
Freemasonry teaches, in its foundational degree, that there is a level that applies to all men — a plane on which rank, station, and background become irrelevant and the only thing that matters is whether a man meets the obligations he has undertaken. For much of American history, the fraternity honored that principle in theory while refusing it in practice to Black men who held the same charter from the same English authority and practiced the same ritual in the same tradition. That history is part of the full story of Freemasonry in America, and in Colorado.
The recognition compact does not erase that history. It does not have to. What it says is that the fraternity, having done the wrong thing for a long time, has done the right thing since. Two Grand Lodges, one founding year, one state, one principle. The level holds.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado — mwphglco.org
Centennial Lodge No. 4, Prince Hall Affiliated — centennial4pha.org/history
Pikes Peak Lodge No. 5, PHA — pikespeak5.com/about-us
Wikipedia, Grand Lodge of Colorado — en.wikipedia.org
Phylaxis Society, Recognition of Prince Hall Grand Lodges in America — thephylaxis.org
Library of Congress, Prince Hall Freemasonry: A Resource Guide — guides.loc.gov
Denver Weekly News, Gridiron to Grand Lodge — denverweeklynews.com