Empire Masonic Lodge
Nevada, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the mid- to late 1800s, settlers established the Empire community, which at one time had a school, post office, churches, stores and a cotton gin. On December 14, 1884, 25 master masons petitioned the Grand Lodge of Texas to form a masonic lodge in Empire. The first officers for Empire Lodge no. 586 were M.W. Mcbride, worshipful master; E.B. Simmons, senior warden; W.M. Blakeman, junior warden; J.E. Jones, secretary; and J.L. Stallings, treasurer. Meetings were held at Empire College on the Saturdays before full moons. In 1888, as Empire began to decline, the masonic lodge moved to Nevada. Members built a two-story wooden building facing west on Warren Street. In 1904, Empire Lodge bought the J.E. Davis building on the northwest corner of the Nevada square and sold the former building. The Davis building was destroyed by the deadly 1927 tornado which led to Nevada’s decline. The lodge endured, and construction began on a new building using funds donated by fellow lodges, the Grand Lodge and a loan; members met in the odd fellows hall until the new structure was completed. In 1972, the lodge moved from that building into a new structure. Masonic Lodge no. 586 has reached out to its surrounding communities since its inception. It adopted Bear Creek Cemetery, the last remaining vestige of the old empire settlement. Over the years, the lodge has also aided children of deceased members in getting into the masonic orphanage, has recommended area children with disabilities for the scottish rite hospital, and has participated in other community, school and social events. Today, it remains historically intertwined with Empire, while functioning as the oldest institution in Nevada.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Empire community once had a school, post office, churches, stores, and a cotton gin, and in 1884 twenty-five master masons chartered a lodge there, meeting on the Saturdays before full moons. As Empire faded in the 1880s the lodge followed the people to Nevada, endured the deadly 1927 tornado that leveled its building, and rebuilt with help from fellow lodges. Long after the Empire settlement vanished, the lodge adopted its last surviving remnant, Bear Creek Cemetery, and remained the oldest institution in Nevada.
Why it matters
It shows how fraternal lodges served as durable civic glue on the Texas frontier, outlasting the very towns that gave them birth.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nevada
Nevada, TX
Nevada grew from an 1830s land grant into a settlement founded by Missouri emigrant Granville Stinebaugh in 1852, incorporating in 1891 as the rich Blackland Prairie drew farmers. The arrival of the St. Louis and Southwestern (later Cotton Belt) Railroad in 1888 pulled the town toward the depot and filled its downtown with shops, hotels, and fraternal lodges. Then, before dawn on May 9, 1927, a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the west side of town, killing 27 and wounding 75, ending Nevada's rise.
Bear Creek Cemetery
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In the mid-1800s, settlers built the community of Empire and organized the Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, whose graveyard took its first marked burials in 1873. Interred here are a Confederate veteran, physician-minister J.L. Brockman, and community leaders, their headstones bearing Masonic and Woodmen of the World emblems. Though Empire's boarding school and church are long gone, the cemetery and the relocated Masonic lodge endure as the settlement's last reminders.
McMinn Chapel Cemetery
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John W. and Evaline McMinn settled this Collin County prairie in 1849, and the community that grew around them took their name. They gave land for a cemetery in 1894, though burials here reach back to 1877, and residents added a church and school to anchor the settlement. When the railroad reached nearby Nevada, families drifted toward the town, and today the graveyard is nearly all that remains of the McMinn community.
Copeville
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Kentucky-born John Miles Cope settled in Collin County in 1848 and helped organize this farming community—first called Black Spot—in the 1850s, becoming its first postmaster in 1878. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1886, the town shifted a mile northeast to trackside, becoming a shipping point for farm produce and prized bois d'arc timber. Copeville grew to about 300 residents and in 1921 gained one of the nation's early female postmasters, Elizabeth Pearce.