Bids go out; the old hall’s last party

In November 1929, weeks after the stock market crash, architect Lamar Q. Cato’s office was taking construction bids for the lodge. On December 31 the lodge held its nineteenth-anniversary watch party in the old frame hall, the last one it would ever host there.

The decision to build a major civic building into the teeth of the Depression says a great deal about the lodge’s confidence in its neighborhood.