Freemasonry arrived in Colorado before Colorado was Colorado. The men who came west for gold in 1858 brought the Craft with them, and the first Masonic gathering in what would become Denver took place in a tent before there was a town to hold it in. The fraternity's history in this state runs from that tent meeting to the building at 16th and Welton where this lodge meets today, and the thread between them is direct.
The First Masons in Colorado (1858–1861)
In the fall of 1858, a group of prospectors and settlers began gathering at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Among them were several Masons, men who had come from lodges in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois, carrying their fraternal bonds into unfamiliar territory. On November 3, 1858, seven of them met informally in a tent at Auraria, the settlement west of Cherry Creek, to share fellowship and mutual support. It was the first recorded Masonic gathering in the region.
Those informal meetings continued through the winter and into 1859, as the Pikes Peak Gold Rush brought thousands more to the area. The Masons among them recognized one another and found in the lodge a reliable source of order and trust in a place that had little of either. As John Chivington, who would become Colorado's first Grand Master, later observed, Freemasonry established a lodge in Colorado long before there was a church or school.
Formal recognition came in August of 1859, when the Grand Lodge of Kansas granted dispensation for Auraria Lodge to operate in the territory. The first official meeting was held on October 1, 1859. As Denver grew and the two settlements of Auraria and Denver City merged, the lodge was rechartered as Denver Lodge No. 5, which remains Colorado's oldest continuously operating lodge and still meets today.
The Grand Lodge of Colorado (1861)
Colorado Territory was created on February 28, 1861, separating the region from Kansas jurisdiction and establishing the need for its own Masonic governance. On August 2 and 3, 1861, representatives from three lodges met in Golden City and formed the Grand Lodge of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Colorado. John Chivington was elected as the first Grand Master.
Chivington is a figure Colorado history cannot address without complexity. He was a Methodist minister, a Union colonel, and a capable organizer of the fraternity's early years in the territory. He was also the commanding officer at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864, when U.S. Army troops killed several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho people at their winter encampment. The lodge bearing his name in Central City was renamed Central Lodge No. 6 in 1868. Honest history requires acknowledging both the man and the record.
By 1861, lodges were operating across the Front Range and into the mining camps of the mountains. The Grand Lodge chartered new lodges, seeded what would become the Grand Lodges of Montana and Wyoming, and provided a framework for civic life in a territory that was building its institutions from the ground up. Henry Teller, who served as Grand Master in 1863 and again from 1867 to 1872, went on to become Colorado's first United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior. The overlap between Masonic leadership and civic leadership in early Colorado was not coincidental.
Statehood and the Building at 16th and Welton (1876–1900)
Colorado entered the Union as the thirty-eighth state on August 1, 1876, the centennial year of American independence, earning it the name the Centennial State. By that year, the Grand Lodge had shepherded the fraternity through the territorial period and was ready to grow with the state it had helped to build.
The 1880s and 1890s were years of significant expansion. Membership grew as Denver became a genuine city. The cornerstone of the Denver Masonic Temple at the corner of 16th and Welton was laid in April of 1889, and the building held its first lodge meeting in June of 1890. It was and remains one of the most significant Masonic buildings in the Rocky Mountain region. The fire of 1984 destroyed the interior, and the building was rebuilt and has operated continuously since. This is the building where Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41 meets today.
It was during this same period of growth that the predecessor lodges of this lodge were chartered. In 1881, a group of German-speaking Masons in Denver petitioned the Grand Lodge for dispensation to charter Schiller Lodge No. 41, named in honor of the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller and authorized to conduct all of its work in the German language. It was the only lodge in Colorado to hold that authorization, and the distinction has passed through every subsequent merger to this lodge. Rob Morris Lodge No. 92 followed in 1892, named by men who had known the Poet Laureate of Freemasonry personally. Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 was chartered in 1903, honoring the Sovereign Grand Commander who had shaped the Scottish Rite for a generation. Three lodges in twenty-two years, all meeting in and around this building, all part of the lineage this lodge carries.
The Twentieth Century
Colorado Freemasonry reached its membership peak in the years following World War II, as the fraternity flourished across the United States alongside the growth of civic organizations of every kind. The Grand Lodge oversaw lodges in communities from the Front Range to the Western Slope, and the appendant bodies operated vigorously in Denver and across the state.
The latter half of the century brought the same membership pressures that affected American Freemasonry broadly. Lodge consolidations became more common as communities changed and smaller lodges found themselves unable to sustain independent operation. The mergers that eventually formed Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41 were part of that broader pattern, two predecessor lodges combining in 2016 and then a second merger in 2019 bringing a stronger and more unified lodge out of what had been five separate bodies at their peak.
The Grand Lodge of Colorado built its current headquarters in Colorado Springs, with the cornerstone laid on March 17, 1973. It houses the Grand Lodge offices, a museum, and a library documenting the fraternity's history in the state. The collection includes records from the earliest territorial lodges and is a resource for anyone researching Colorado's Masonic history in depth.
Prince Hall Freemasonry in Colorado
Prince Hall Freemasonry has its own history in Colorado, running parallel to the mainstream Grand Lodge through periods of legal segregation and into a modern era of mutual recognition. Prince Hall Masonry descends from African Lodge No. 459, warranted by the Grand Lodge of England in 1784 for Prince Hall and a group of free Black men in Boston who had been refused admission to existing lodges.
Colorado's mainstream Grand Lodge began moving toward formal recognition of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Colorado in 1990, under Grand Master Dwight A. Hamilton. Connecticut had led the way in 1989, and Colorado was among the early adopters of a compact affirming the sovereignty and legitimacy of both grand lodges and establishing mutual visitation rights.
On October 19, 2022, the two grand lodges rededicated that compact at the Colorado Supreme Court Hall in the State Capitol, with former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason under the Prince Hall jurisdiction, delivering the keynote address. The ceremony was a formal acknowledgment that both traditions represent regular Freemasonry in Colorado, operating alongside each other with mutual respect.
Colorado Freemasonry Today
The Grand Lodge of Colorado currently oversees more than one hundred active lodges, with four memorial lodges and one research lodge. Lodges operate in communities across the Front Range, the Western Slope, and the mountain towns in between. The fraternity's charitable work continues through lodge-level giving, the Scottish Rite Foundation's language disorder programs, the Shriners Hospitals network, and individual scholarship and relief funds maintained by lodges throughout the state.
Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41, meeting in Denver at the building on 16th and Welton that has housed Masonic lodge work since 1890. The lodge's history in this building spans more than a century through its predecessor lodges, and the work continues in the same room where Albert Pike Lodge and its predecessors met before it.
Sources: Grand Lodge of Colorado (coloradofreemasons.org); George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Grand Lodge of Colorado profile (gwmemorial.org); Denver Lodge No. 5 (denver5.org); lodge records of Schiller Lodge No. 41, Rob Morris Lodge No. 92, Albert Pike Lodge No. 117, and Pythagoras Lodge No. 41.