Brooklyn is a small community located in southeast Conecuh County and is the home to Dean Lodge No. 112, which is one of four Masonic lodges in Conecuh County. Dean Lodge, which is located at 32515 Conecuh County Road 6, meets on the first and third Thursdays of the month.
I’ve wanted to visit this old Masonic lodge building ever since November 2011 when I ran across a news item concerning the building in a century-old issue of The Conecuh Record newspaper. In the Nov. 2, 1911 edition of The Record, the correspondent from the Brooklyn community reported that the “Masonic hall is nearly completed at a cost of nearly $2,000. The building is 28x85 feet with a store under the hall. It is a great improvement to our town. Rabun & Feagin have moved into the new Masonic building and have a fine display of goods.”
I mentioned this old news item in my editorial column that week and members of the Brooklyn lodge told me later that the building built in November 1911 burned sometime in the late 1920s, probably in 1928. The current lodge building was built on the same site and is almost identical to the original building.
Lodge Secretary Eddie Ralls gave me a guided tour of the lodge building last Thursday evening, and I was impressed by how much he knew about the building. The ground floor currently contains the lodge’s fellowship area, where lodge members eat and enjoy each other’s company before going upstairs for their meetings. The room is decorated with a number of old photos, and you can almost imagine the old store that once filled the space.
The second floor contains the actual lodge meeting chamber, and it’s also decorated with a number of old photos, including photos of the lodge’s Past Masters and an autographed photo of former Alabama governor, George Wallace, who once visited the lodge as a Mason. An old American flag also hangs from one wall, and while no one’s sure how old it is, it’s so old that it only has 48 stars, which indicates that it was made before 1959. Another wall is decorated with the lodge’s charter, which is dated 1929. The story goes that the lodge’s original charter was much older, but it was destroyed when the previous lodge building burned.
Like many Masonic lodges in small communities, membership numbers at Dean Lodge have dwindled over the years. In its prime, the lodge once had nearly 160 members, but now the lodge has less than 40 members. Those remaining members are some of the finest folks you’ll ever meet. They take great pride in being members of Dean Lodge 112 and appreciate the rich history of their lodge. As mentioned earlier, the lodge meets on the first and third Thursdays of each month.
In the end, I enjoyed scratching another item off my bucket list. How many of you have ever visited the Masonic lodge building at Brooklyn? What did you think about it? Let us know in the comments section below.
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