McAllen Lodge No. 1110, A.F. & A.M.

🏛️The era

In 1915, McAllen was still a young town. The railroad had reached the lower Rio Grande Valley only about a decade earlier, and it changed the region fast. Ranch country turned into farm country. Land promoters brought prospective settlers south by the trainload, irrigation canals spread across the delta, and citrus and vegetable farms took over land that had been brush and pasture.

That growth brought newcomers from across the United States, and from Mexico, just a few miles to the south. Towns like McAllen were creating their institutions as fast as they could: churches, schools, banks, newspapers and fraternal societies.

It was also an anxious time on the border. The Mexican Revolution had been raging since 1910, and 1915 saw raids, reprisals and violence in the Valley. A lodge founded that December was putting down roots during one of the most uncertain years in the region's history.

👥People & events

The lodge started with Master Mason R. M. Bounds and about thirty other Masons. In a booming town like McAllen, most people had come from somewhere else, and Masons were no exception. Each man had been initiated in another lodge, sometimes in another state. Getting a charter on December 8, 1915 gave them a home of their own in their new town.

For its first years the lodge rented space instead of owning it. Members met in the Joseph and Osborne buildings, two of downtown McAllen's early commercial blocks. In young towns, lodges often met upstairs over shops and offices while they saved up for a building of their own.

Masonry is passed on person to person, through ritual and instruction, and the lodge had well-known teachers in Isadore Moritz and Hugh R. Lockhart. Their students came from many different Masonic jurisdictions, each with its own habits and traditions, so teaching them was a real job. They turned a mixed group of transplants into one working lodge.

In 1927 the lodge built its own temple on this site, a sign that both the lodge and the town had grown up. Over the years two of its members became Grand Masters, the highest office in a state's Masonic organization. The marker treats that as a point of particular pride.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, fraternal organizations were among the most important civic groups in American life. Masons, Odd Fellows, Woodmen and many others gave people in new towns a place to network and offered help to members' families in hard times. They also served as a training ground for civic leaders. The men who ran lodges often ended up running school boards, chambers of commerce and city councils.

Freemasonry in Texas goes back before statehood. Its Grand Lodge was organized in the days of the Republic of Texas. A lodge numbered 1110 shows how far the movement had spread by the 1910s, with lodges in growing towns across the state.

McAllen Lodge tells that larger story in one place. The marker's note about members from many jurisdictions sums up the early twentieth-century Rio Grande Valley: newcomers from all over, using a shared tradition to build a community.

🧭If you visit

The marker stands on the site of the temple the lodge built in 1927, in a city that has grown enormously since. As you stand there, try to picture McAllen when the lodge was new: a small railroad town on flat delta land, with farms on every side and the river not far off.

Buildings like this are easy to drive past. Look for the architectural details and symbols that lodges often worked into their buildings. Remember that this was more than a meeting hall. For generations it helped hold the town's civic life together.

This stop fits well into a Rio Grande Valley road trip built around border history. The region's story runs from Spanish colonial ranching to the railroad boom to its blend of cultures today. The marker says the lodge is still active, so treat the site as a working institution and be respectful, not as a relic.