About Us
About Our Lodge
Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41 was chartered by the Grand Lodge of Colorado on January 25, 2019, the result of a merger between Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 and Pythagoras Lodge No. 41. The lodge it created carries the combined history of five predecessor lodges reaching back to 1881, the only Masonic charter in Colorado authorizing work in the German language, and one of the rarest Masonic artifacts in the Rocky Mountain region.
We are named for the Marquis de Lafayette. The name is not symbolic. His apron is in this building.
How We Came to Be
In 2017, Worshipful Master Ricky Haskell of Pythagoras Lodge No. 41 began conversations with Worshipful Master Lee Miller of Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 about merging the two lodges. After nearly two years of work between the lodges, the Grand Lodge of Colorado granted the charter on January 25, 2019.
The new lodge kept the lowest number of its lineage. Masonic lodges are numbered in the order they are chartered, and by tradition we retained the number 41, first held by Schiller Lodge No. 41 when it was chartered in 1881. The name came from something none of us anticipated finding: a hand-painted silk apron, once carried by the Marquis de Lafayette himself, authenticated by one of the foremost Masonic historians in the country, and on permanent display in this building.
About the Lafayette Apron
Lafayette came to America in 1777 as a young French aristocrat, largely on his own initiative, to support the Revolutionary cause. He met George Washington that August. Washington treated him as a son; Lafayette, who had lost his father in infancy, was devoted to the general in return. Washington's confidence in the young officer deepened with time, and somewhere in those years, as the lodge's own records put it, Lafayette became a Freemason. The historical record on the exact date and lodge is genuinely unclear, which is itself a piece of the story worth knowing.
During America's fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1824, Lafayette returned to tour all twenty-four states. He was sixty-seven years old and received everywhere as a living relic of the founding era. During his travels he visited Apollo King Solomon's Lodge No. 13 in Troy, New York. At the close of the meeting, he presented his personal hand-painted silk apron to the lodge's Master, Worshipful Brother Adna Treat.
The apron passed from WB Treat to his son, then to a brother, then as a gift to a nephew: Worshipful Brother Nathan O. Vosburgh, who served as Treasurer of Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 in Denver. On September 27, 1928, WB Vosburgh formally presented the apron to Albert Pike Lodge. It was placed in a picture frame and stored, and at some point found its way to the back of a closet, where it remained for the better part of eighty years.
Around 2008, our Secretary Emeritus, Worshipful Brother Christopher Scott, discovered the apron while cleaning out that closet. He traced the documentation, placed a call to the current Secretary of Apollo King Solomon's Lodge in Troy, and then contacted the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. The memorial's Director of Collections, WB Mark Tabbert, authenticated the apron as Lafayette's. It was displayed at the memorial for several years before returning to Denver, where it has been on permanent display ever since.
The apron survived the 1984 fire that destroyed the interior of the Denver Masonic building because Albert Pike Lodge had been meeting at the Lakewood Lodge building for several years before the fire. It was not in the building when it burned.