The Black Odd Fellows Who Built Their Own Order—and Filled a Seattle Hall
Barred from the white Odd Fellows, Seattle’s Mount Rainier Lodge No. 88 celebrated the Grand United Order’s 54th anniversary with speeches, uniforms and a crowd of about 400.
Yesterday being the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows (Colored) in America, the occasion was fittingly celebrated in Seattle. The lodges of this city and vicinity held thanksgiving services in Chisholm’s Hall, on Front Street, and in the evening a number of Seattle people went to Tacoma and attended a big jollification there.
The speeches of the day were made by Rev. Adam W. Whaley of the Jones Street A.M.E. Church, this city, and I. I. Walker, master of ceremonies and P.S.F.
The hall was crowded with the members of the two lodges and their friends—about four hundred people present—and the services were very impressive. The building was finely decorated with flowers and hot-house plants, and the occasion was one that will long be remembered by those who were in attendance. The members of the home lodge, Mount Rainier No. 88, and those of the Tacoma order occupied front seats and were in full uniform. Both speakers dwelt on the history of the order, and Mr. Walker called to mind the labor of organizing the first lodge, No. 646, in New York on March 1, 1843.
The constitution of the American order prohibited the colored man from joining the Odd Fellows, and so the G.U.O.O.F. sprang from the English branch of the order and owes its existence to English parentage. While the order was introduced in this country on the 1st of March, for convenience the date of the annual thanksgiving celebration was changed to the first Sunday in March, and thus the colored people here yesterday were doing only what their brethren all over the United States were doing. Mr. Walker stated that there are now in this order 89,548 members, 3,700 lodges, 91 Houses of Ruth, 107 past Grand Masters and 83 patriarchs; that the lodges had raised $27,401 for the relief of widows, the sick, the orphans and other charitable purposes.
The home lodge was organized on November 30, 1882, with twenty-nine members, and the lodge now has twenty-four members, two having died and three moving away.
“The constitution of the American order prohibited the colored man from joining the Odd Fellows, and so the G.U.O.O.F. sprang from the English branch of the order and owes its existence to English parentage.”
The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows was a parallel Black fraternal network created because the white Odd Fellows barred Black members. In 1895 Seattle’s Mount Rainier Lodge No. 88 filled Chisholm’s Hall for its 54th anniversary—an early example of Black Seattle building its own institutions in the face of exclusion. The venue stood on Front Street, now First Avenue, in the heart of today’s historic waterfront and Pioneer Square corridor.
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