Elgin Lodge No. 328, A. F. & A. M.

🏛️The era

In 1870, Texas was in the middle of Reconstruction. The Civil War had ended only five years earlier, and the state was rebuilding its government, its economy, and its institutions. In rural communities like those of Bastrop County, ordinary life was organized around farms, churches, and voluntary associations.

Fraternal orders such as the Freemasons were especially important. A Masonic lodge offered fellowship, mutual aid, and a sense of order. Often it also offered something more concrete: a sturdy building. In places with little public money and few public structures, a lodge hall could be the most substantial building around.

The 1870s also brought railroads into central Texas. Wherever the tracks went, new towns sprang up, and older communities that the railroad bypassed often lost people and businesses to them. Elgin was one of those railroad towns, and the lodge's move there in 1877 follows a pattern repeated across Texas.

👥People & events

The lodge was chartered on June 18, 1870, as Perryville Lodge No. 328. It met in the small community of Perryville, which was also known by the colorful nickname Hogeye, about two and a half miles south of present-day Elgin. The second name is a reminder of how informal and local frontier place-names often were.

In 1877 the lodge moved to Elgin, the growing town on the railroad. It kept its Perryville name for more than two decades before formally becoming Elgin Lodge in 1901. That long gap hints at how attached members were to the lodge's original roots.

The most remarkable part of this story is the lodge's buildings. Its first two Masonic halls were shared with public schools, so local children learned in the same spaces where Masons met. Arrangements like this were common in nineteenth-century Texas, where communities pooled their resources to get one good building to serve more than one purpose.

In 1934, during the Great Depression, McDade Lodge No. 664 merged into Elgin Lodge. McDade was another nearby railroad community. Mergers like this were often a sign of hard times and population shifts, as smaller lodges in shrinking towns joined larger neighbors to survive.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Across nineteenth-century America, fraternal organizations were among the most important building blocks of community life. Before government provided many public services, lodges supplied fellowship, charity, burial aid, and meeting space, and Freemasonry was among the oldest and most widespread of these orders.

The shared lodge-and-school halls of Elgin point to a larger truth about American education. Public schooling in rural places was often built from the ground up by local people, using whatever buildings they could share. Before a town had a dedicated schoolhouse, its first classes might meet upstairs in a lodge hall or in a church.

The lodge's journey from Perryville to Elgin, and its later merger with McDade, also follows the railroad age in miniature. Across the country, rail lines decided which communities grew and which faded, and the institutions people built had to move with them.

🧭If you visit

Elgin is a pleasant small town east of Austin. It is well known for its brick-making heritage and its sausage, and its historic downtown grew up along the railroad that drew the lodge here in 1877. Walking the older streets helps you imagine the railroad-era town the Masons moved to.

As you stand at the marker, think about the community of Perryville, or Hogeye, a short distance to the south. That little community was the lodge's first home. Picture schoolchildren and lodge members sharing the same hall, one of the most practical arrangements of frontier life.

This stop fits nicely into a day exploring Bastrop County and the countryside east of Austin, where small railroad towns, old cemeteries, and historic downtowns tell the story of how central Texas grew. Since this is a working lodge's history, enjoy the marker from public spaces and respect any private property nearby.