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A Brief Masonic History of the Neenah/Menasha Lodge

A group of Masons received dispensation to meet in Menasha in February of 1855.  After several meetings a lodge was chartered in June of the same year. The name of this first lodge was Menasha Lodge #61.  Not yet owning a building the meetings were held in various Menasha buildings.  During an October meeting the members voted to move to Neenah.  The Master called the meeting “from labor to refreshment” the Officers then took the lights and jewels to a hall in Neenah where the meeting was closed.  The Menasha Lodge #61 that started in Menasha was now moved to Neenah.  A name change and location change was approved two years later.  At a meeting in June of 1857 the lodge was renamed Tyrian Lodge #61 and officially was a Neenah lodge.

In December of that same year 1857, dispensation was given to form another lodge in Menasha.  A group of masons started to meet in a building owned by John A. Bryan and in June of 1858 a charter was issued to John A. Bryan Lodge #98 in Menasha.  Now there was both a lodge in Neenah and a lodge in Menasha.

Now getting back to Tyrian Lodge #61 in Neenah, it was renamed Kane Lodge #61 in December of 1857.  This was done in the memory of a noted explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, also an astronomer, chemist, surgeon and Mason who spent two years in the Arctic searching for a fellow Masonic explorer Sir John
Franklin.  In June of 1924 the name was formally changed to Elisha Kent Kane Lodge #61.  Between 1857 and 1925 the lodge met in a several different Neenah locations.  In 1925 it moved into its newly erected Masonic Temple.

The lodges in Neenah and Menasha continued until 1995.  At that time John A. Bryan Lodge #98, of Menasha, and Elisha Kent Kane Lodge #61 merged to form Twin Cities Lodge #61 of Neenah/Menasha.  The Menasha buildings were sold and the merged lodges met and continue to meet at the Neenah Temple
that was built in 1925.  Some of the original members of the committee to raise money and supervise the work for this building were C. B. Clark, George Whiting, George Klinke, John Hewitt, Frank Kellogg, Frank Mace, E. E. Lampert and Frank Laird.