The twenty-four-inch gauge is the first working tool given to an Entered Apprentice Mason. We find it described as an instrument of the operative Mason with no authority other than ritual cited. The instrument is not mentioned in the Gothic Constitutions as used in early Masonic ceremonies. In the Edinburg Register House Manuscript (1696), we find it referred to as the “common judge” (a gauge or template). It is first mentioned as the twenty-four-inch gauge in 1724, then again in 1762 in the Masonic exposure, Jachin and Boaz. The term is found again in Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemasons Monitor or Illustrations of Masonry (1797).
In October 1859, the then Grand Master of Kentucky, Rob Morris, asked whether Masonry would survive the causes at work deteriorating it. He also expressed that it was the Masonic knowledge in the few that sustained the Institution when the Masonic knowledge of the many brought it down. In November 2022, Robert G. Davis, Past Grand Master of Oklahoma, delivered a dynamic and timely presentation as the guest speaker at a dinner event in Northern Kentucky sponsored by the William O. Ware Lodge of Research. The title of his presentation was, “It’s Time to Cross the Rubicon and Battle Our 20th Century Ruffians.”
A Message to Garcia was originally published as filler without a title in the March 1899 issue of the avant-garde magazine, The Philistine, a periodical published in East Aura, New York. The publication, at the time, was written entirely by American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher, Elbert Hubbard. Soon after the appearance of the untitled article, orders came for more copies and eventually reprints (reported to be as many as 225 million by 1926) were distributed around the world. The message of the inspirational essay spawned two Hollywood films, was translated into 37 languages, and became well-known in American popular and business culture until the middle of the twentieth century.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, prolific journalist, and British author, was well known for his apologetics, biographies, detective fiction, literary, social, and political commentary, and modern history. Reviews of his writing commonly note his mastery of paradox, genius, and cordial and humor. Whenever possible, Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, and allegories—first carefully turning them inside out. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years. Many of his essays and opinion writings were published as books. Today, over one-hundred books by or about Chesterton’s writings are published.
In 1709, a proverb written by English poet and satirist, Alexander Pope, summarizes what many earnest-minded Masons, leaders in the Fraternity, and those we consider the most illuminated Masonic scholars have cautioned the Fraternity about since at least the early 1800s. Once the academic world began to pay attention to the phenomenon of Freemasonry as a part of social history around the mid-20th century, they, too, joined the choir. Pope’s proverb has become the troubling truth in our Fraternity, which has been so steadily expressed that it is practically qualified as a Landmark. He wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Two and half years after the end of the Civil War the Southern economic market remained bankrupt. Reconstruction of the South (1865-77) was in its infant stage. Redressing the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy was an extremely slow process, not to mention the efforts to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union the eleven states that had seceded.
In 1820, Lexington, Kentucky was one of the largest and wealthiest towns west of the Allegheny Mountains. So cultured was its lifestyle that the city gained the nickname, “the Athens of the West.” The exceptionally warm temperatures and rainfall in the spring of 1833 left large pools of standing water in the downtown area of the community that did not yet have a sufficient sanitary water supply or run off disposal system. The town’s drinking water was soon contaminated. A brief but devastating cholera epidemic ensued.
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This is the Entered Apprentice Tracing Board on display at Lexington Lodge No. 1.
Masonic Perspectives is a project created by Past Masters John W. Bizzack, Ph.D. and Dan M. Kemble intended to bring the writings about controversial topics of the past in American Freemasonry and provide readers a second look and contemporary perspective on the topics to serve as a catalyst for further discussion. This project is a joint venture of Lexington Lodge No. 1, The Rubicon Masonic Society, and William O. Ware Lodge of Research, Covington, Kentucky.