…I just found a gallery of pictures from the 2004 fire in Bangor when the Masonic Temple burned down. Amazingly, the photographer got there before the firefighters started spraying the water that made later pictures so iconic, and stayed there until the wrecking ball went to work the next day.

While cleaning last night, Donna came across some pictures that her step-mom took at our installation as Worthy Matron and Worthy Patron of Tuscan Chapter #148, OES, in Bangor. Since they were taken from a distance with our PHD camera, they were all underexposed, but I was able to get some detail back using the Gimp.

I didn’t miss the hall just being 3000 miles away from it, but since it burned down, I’ve been very homesick for it.

I’ve been annoyed in the past year since the Bangor Masonic Hall burned down that I didn’t have pictures of the inside. The Google Image Search just found me some pictures of various Masons in the East at a special initiatory meeting (scroll to the bottom).

Here’s a list of the orders that met in the Bangor Masonic Temple before it burned down in January. Note the names at the end of the list. :-)

If you’d like to contribute to the rebuilding of the Bangor Masonic Hall, you can send contributions to:

Grand Lodge of Maine
Bangor Masonic Temple Fund
Harold McKenney, Treas.
P. O. Box 15058
Portland, ME 04112-5058

It’s sad to see how many hits this blog has been getting from people searching for the fire at the Bangor Masonic Hall. I’d rather be Scobleized any day.

This picture was taken the day after the fire started. (Update: …and has since expired. Should have copied it when I had the chance…) (Another update: Not as good, but try this one.)

Another of the things lost in the blaze was Rising Virtue’s original charter, which (iirc) was granted by the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, instead of Maine, as this was only the 10th lodge formed in the state.

The main lodge room was huge: you could have dropped some other lodge _buildings_ inside it. It was divided in half by curtains, which made it small enough to have a meeting inside without worrying about being heard. Mostly. :-)

And the building is a complete loss: they had to pull the firefighters out when the floors started collapsing around them. They started knocking it down while it was still burning because of the danger of the walls falling outwards.

My mother-in-law just called to let us know that the Masonic Temple in Bangor, ME just burned. That’s where my Eastern Star home chapter, Tuscan #148, is based. When Donna joined Rainbow, Bangor Assembly met in that hall.

I know that the safe that the chapter records are in was never kept locked when I was there, so they’re probably a total loss. There’s also a lovely Square and Compasses that was carved out of a single piece of wood that I would be surprised to find it made it through.

Our thoughts are with you, sisters and brothers.