When Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. mentioned in passing at a Sept. 15 City Council meeting that the city shares City Hall with a local Masonic lodge, it was the first many had heard of the longtime Jackson urban legend. This legend, however, happens to be true, and nothing like a Dan Brown novel.
Councilman Jeff Weill, who says he had heard about the relationship "peripherally," unwittingly resurrected the story when he asked Johnson about the city's need for 24-hour security at City Hall.
"We've got a 24-hour armed guard even on weekends," Weill told the Jackson Free Press. "There's no reason we need a person like that, when most other public buildings in Jackson just have an alarm system."
Johnson explained to Weill that the city had to pay for around-the-clock security to accommodate the Masons. Weill, always vigilant about fat in the city budget, considers the roughly $50,000 that the city pays for City Hall security excessive.
"I can't imagine the Masons would throw up their hands and cry outrage if we didn't have an armed security guard in City Hall on the Fourth of July," Weill said.
Still, Weill was intrigued by the relationship and sent requests for information to the Masons and the mayor's office.
"I've heard that somewhere deep in City Hall is a Masonic lodge-looking thing," Weill said. "When (former Mayor) Frank (Melton) was alive, he told me he was going to give me a tour of City Hall to show me that room. We never got around to doing that."
Weill's peripheral knowledge of the Masons' claim to City Hall is typical of city leaders. Former Councilman and Jackson State University professor Leslie McLemore said that he knew of little more than the presence of a Masonic meeting room in City Hall.
"I just know we have the arrangement," McLemore said. "I was sort of surprised to learn about it when I joined the City Council."
Former Mayor Kane Ditto also confessed to knowing little about the agreement, other than its existence. "I know during my term in office it was discussed several times, but I don't know that I've actually seen documentation," Ditto said.
City spokesman Chris Mims confirmed that the city does have an agreement with the Masons allowing the organization use of a third-floor meeting room in perpetuity, but he could not retrieve any formal documentation of the relationship.
The Masons' claim to City Hall dates back to the building's construction, which began in 1846, Mims said. In that year, the mayor and aldermen of the city of Jackson, which was still in its infancy, began to discuss consolidating government functions into a single building. An act passed by the state Legislature nearly a decade earlier had already granted the Jackson Masonic organizations the right to build a lodge on the same site, however.
So when the city began to hire contractors, representatives of the Masons and another fraternal organization, the Odd Fellows, approached the city with an offer to pay for the addition of a second floor to what was intended to be a single-story building. In return for paying the added cost of building a second floor and reinforcing the lower walls with roughly 100,000 additional bricks, the Masons and Odd Fellows gained the right to use the new floor in perpetuity.
Work on the building was slow. As was common for public buildings at the time, the corner-stone ceremony on July 22, 1853, was accompanied by the "singing of a Masonic Ode," according to an account from the "Flag of the Union" newspaper. The building was finally completed in 1854.
As bizarre as it may seem to contemporary citizens for a private fraternal organization to meet in a public building, the practice was anything but unusual when City Hall was built. Many political leaders at all levels were Masons: President George Washington laid the corner-stone for the U.S. Capitol in a Masonic ceremony. S.P. Baley, a mayor of Jackson during the 1830s, was also the first Master of Pearl Lodge 23, one of the three branches that currently use City Hall for meetings. During the Civil War, Masons met in the Senate chamber of the Old Capitol.
Masonry also had its role in the state's black political leadership as well. The offices of the Mississippi Conference NAACP are housed inside the M.W. Stringer Lodge on Lynch Street, headquarters for the historically black Prince Hall Affiliated Freemasons. Although the two organizations are now distinct, the Prince Hall Masons helped establish the Mississippi NAACP, president Derrick Johnson explained.
"Wherever they had their headquarters, they housed all their auxiliaries, including the NAACP," Johnson said.
Despite their deep roots in city history, the Masons have had to explain their presence at City Hall anew several times. In 1946, The Clarion-Ledger ran an article titled "Still Some Question Who Owns City Hall: No Record of Lodge Hall Agreement." The article refers to "local attorney W. Harold Cox," who was puzzled by the Masons' claim to the building and "is at a loss to explain how the (Masonic) orders ever obtained use of the rooms."
Current Pearl Lodge treasurer Arthur Jackson remembers former Mayor Melton touring the third-floor meeting room early in his term after learning that the Masons used it. He said that sort of thing happens with every new administration.
"We always have to tell them again," Jackson said.
Three branches of Masonic organizations currently use the meeting room in City Hall, according to Micky McMahan, secretary for the Grand Lodge of Mississippi, the parent organization for Free and Accepted Masons in the state. Pearl Lodge 23, which currently counts roughly 230 members, dates back to 1835 and has used the city facilities since the building's construction in. A predominantly female organization, the Order of the Eastern Star, founded in 1850, also meets there. And a new 80-member Masonic body, the Mississippi Lodge of Research, meets regularly at City Hall.
The Odd Fellows, which joined the Masons' original agreement with the city, left City Hall after its 1964 renovation, which added two floors to the then-two-story building, putting the Masons' room on the new third floor. No Jackson lodges are listed in the phone book or online, and none of the Masons interviewed knew of any current Odd Fellows meetings.
The Odd Fellows and Masons are both victims of a general disinterest in fraternal organizations among younger Americans. McMahan estimates that the average age of the Grand Lodge's 21,000 members is somewhere in the mid-60s.
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