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How an obscure fraternal society is fighting to save a piece of 19th-century history in rural Maryland
By JONATHAN M. PITTS
THE BALTIMORE SUN |
APR 25, 2018
The Independent Order of Odd Fellows is not, as the uninitiated might guess, a brotherhood for the eccentric or the anti-social. It's a society formed in Britain centuries ago to "improve and elevate the character of mankind" — one that still claims more than 600,000 members, including about 300 in 19 chapters in Maryland.
But that's not what got Chris Milan interested in joining. For the 47-year-old Baltimore County man, it was all about a building.
Milan is from Kingsville, a close-knit, semi-rural community between the Big Gunpowder Falls and Little Gunpowder Falls rivers.
Like almost everyone else in Kingsville and neighboring Upper Falls, he has attended more bingo nights, bull roasts and birthday parties in the rambling old structure at Bradshaw and Raphel roads than he can count.
Milan is Noble Grand, or president, of I.O.O.F. Lodge 175, the chapter that owns the 19th century building. Now the roof is sagging, the paint is peeling and the insurance company is threatening to cancel the policy. Milan is helping to lead a campaign to save the hall.
Lodge 175 has until the end of the year to raise $25,000 to finance needed repairs or lose the insurance. If it can't, Milan says, the building will be put up for sale, and generations of Kingsville-Upper Falls history will come to an end.
"This is where we have our lodge meetings twice a month, but the whole community has always used the building," Milan said in the wood-paneled assembly hall one recent afternoon. "It's a gathering place for big events in people's lives. We've all been to dances and concerts and graduation parties here. Now our kids are doing the same thing.
"Life wouldn't be the same without it."
The Maryland Historical Trust dates the old clapboard structure to sometime in the 1800s, when a bucolic community founded as McCubbinsville was starting to take shape.
Local historians say the Baltimore County school board bought the half-acre site at the intersection of Bradshaw, Franklinville and Raphel roads in 1859 and built an elementary school. Architects working with the historic trust say its rectangular core and projecting bell tower provide evidence it was a school.
Nearly 40 years later, according to records kept by nearby St. Stephen Church, a business known as the Upper Falls Casino Company was formed to serve "educational, literary, dramatic, musical and social purposes, also for buying, selling, mortgaging, leasing, improving, disposing of or otherwise dealing in land."
The company — and it apparently used the word "casino" in the 19th century sense, to mean a public space that hosted pleasurable activities — bought the site in 1896 and turned the place into a cultural hub.
Over the next several decades, the church records say, it became a "popular venue for hosting events of St. Stephen Parish as well as the Upper Falls Dramatic Club, Salem Methodist Church, St. John's Episcopal Church, the Democratic Party, and the Upper Falls Cotillion Club."
As Upper Falls grew, a succession of owners enlarged the building's footprint in quirky fits and starts.
Around 1930, Lodge 175 started holding meetings in a room on the second floor, a space that still holds the accouterments of initiation rites: a thick Bible on a pedestal, an ""I.O.O.F." podium, a throne-like chair.
The lodge has met there every other Wednesday night more or less ever since.