“Come see our new carpet”

The lodge’s 1998 Christmas notice, published in the classifieds like a thousand notices before it, ends with an invitation of perfect domestic pride: stop by after dinner “to see our new carpet.”

Eighty-eight years after the charter came home from Waco, the lodge’s voice in the newspapers was unchanged: neighborly, practical, and quietly proud of its house. The building on Harvard Street began with exactly that spirit.