The Sovereign Grand Commander Comes to Port Townsend
General Albert Pike arrives by steamer to inspect the local lodges, lectures to the brethren, and is feted with a banquet and a Scow Bay clambake.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
DISTINGUISHED OUTFIT — LODGES ALL FILLED. — The Phantom arrived from Port Gamble bringing General Albert Pike, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, on an official visit to the Masonic Lodges of this town. He was accompanied by Judge McCracken, 33°, an Inspector General of the State of [—], Dr. Riley, 32°, Major Hufden, 32°, Judge F. Damon, 33°, of Lebanon No. 4, Port Gamble, and a number of the brethren. He was received at the wharf by the members of the Lafayette Lodge of Perfection No. 3 and escorted to the hotel. In the evening he visited [the lodge rooms], where he was greeted by the Masons of this jurisdiction generally, who listened to his able lecture with much satisfaction. Subsequently they partook of an ample banquet provided by the A. & A. S. R. On Thursday the Order, with invited guests, repaired to the clambake at Scow Bay on the cutter Wolcott, tendered for the occasion.
“He was received at the wharf by the members of the Lafayette Lodge of Perfection No. 3 and escorted to the hotel.”
A steamer docking at the Port Townsend wharf to deliver a fraternal dignitary was, in 1876, the town's version of a state visit — the lodge was one of the few civic institutions that spanned the scattered settlements of the Sound. Albert Pike would become a mythologised figure in later American conspiracy lore, yet here he is simply a guest praising the brethren and eating clams at Scow Bay. Port Townsend still trades on the same instinct: a small town that stages a large occasion to prove it is not small.
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