Queens Masonic History / Lodge Histories / Cornucopia Lodge No. 563
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In 1864, Flushing’s first Masonic lodge began with borrowed regalia and bylaws. Its early records follow men assembling an institution from rented rooms, public ceremonies, and local connections—and a lodge that eventually outlived its own temple.
November 8, 2026 · By Brete Murphy
A Tenant with Borrowed Regalia
In its first months, in the fall of 1864, Flushing’s new Masonic lodge owned almost nothing.
Its collars, jewels and aprons were borrowed from Keystone Lodge No. 235. Its bylaws were borrowed too, adopted wholesale from Keystone until the members could write their own.
The minutes do not identify the first meeting place. But on January 4, 1865, Cornucopia paid Pacific Lodge of the Odd Fellows $18.75 for a quarter’s rent.
The lodge began life as a tenant with borrowed regalia.
Its anniversary history opens with Civil War drama and men “confident of their Destiny.” The details drawn from its early minutes offer a more tangible beginning: about ten men assembling an institution out of rented rooms, borrowed things, and a determination to establish themselves in public.
The story of Cornucopia Lodge No. 563 is one strand of the story of how Flushing organized itself.
A Village in Wartime
Flushing in 1864 was an incorporated village within the larger Town of Flushing, a status it had held since 1837.
A railroad had connected it to the East River at Hunters Point since 1854. The farms and nurseries around the village were gradually giving way to house lots.
In 1862, the town completed a new brick Town Hall on what is now Northern Boulevard. Its upper assembly room served military and civic purposes during the Civil War. In January 1865, the Flushing Journal advertised a lecture there by Frederick Douglass.
The building’s early role as a place for military gatherings, speeches and public functions is described in [Brownstoner’s history of Flushing Town Hall](Queenswalk: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Boulevard | Brownstoner
Queenswalk: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Boulevard | Brownstoner I love this building. It has a wonderful sense of whimsy and joy to it, and is just a delight to behold. Unlike the usually dour and ponderous town halls of
A Masonic lodge was another institution the village had yet to establish.
Flushing men who were already Masons had joined lodges elsewhere. Most of Cornucopia’s charter members came from Morton Lodge No. 63 in Hempstead, then also within Queens County. Others came from lodges in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Morton and Jamaica Lodge No. 546 recommended the new lodge to the Grand Lodge, which issued its dispensation on September 12, 1864.
Flushing’s First Lodge, Not Queens County’s
Cornucopia’s histories identify it as the first Masonic body formed in the village of Flushing.
That geographical qualification matters.
It was not the first lodge in Queens County. Jamaica Lodge was already at work and helped Cornucopia get started. Morton supplied most of its charter members.
Cornucopia’s distinction belongs to Flushing itself, not to the whole county.
The lodge’s published historical timeline retains that narrower founding claim.
Who Joined
The charter list reads like a cross-section of a prosperous village’s middle ranks.
The first Master, Charles W. Brown, was a school commissioner. The other charter members included:
- A carpenter.
- Two farmers.
- A hotel keeper.
- A bookkeeper.
- A merchant.
- A bank clerk.
- A cigar dealer.
- An attorney.
These occupations, recorded in the lodge’s 1940 anniversary program, suggest a group connected to local commerce, administration, skilled work and agriculture.
They do not, by themselves, establish the wealth or social standing of every man. They do show the range of people brought into regular company under the lodge’s rules.
The men who joined next broadened that circle.
Five petitions arrived at the first meeting and seven at the second. Among the earliest initiates were two men named Lawrence. By the time the lodge received its warrant in June 1865, three Lawrences held office, along with a Willets and a Corse.
Those surnames were familiar in Flushing’s history. Their appearance in the officer list does not, without genealogical evidence, establish the men’s relationships to particular established families.
In its first nine months, the lodge made 33 Masons and rejected 15 petitioners. The initiation fee rose from $25 to $30 within a month of chartering.
By the first annual meeting, in December 1865, there were 53 members.
The lodge offered a formal setting in which men from different occupations could meet, hold office and become known to one another. That was not the same as social equality, but it was a distinct form of belonging.
Making It Public
Cornucopia was constituted on Wednesday evening, June 21, 1865, and the members made sure the village noticed.
Grand Master Robert D. Holmes came to Flushing with about a dozen grand officers. After the lodge opened, the company walked in procession to Town Hall, where the lodge was consecrated and its officers installed in public.
Then everyone adjourned to Wooley’s Hotel for dinner. By the lodge’s account, nearly everyone present made a speech.
The choice of Town Hall mattered.
Only a few years old, it was already a civic stage: a place for military gatherings, lectures, concerts and politics. Installing officers there presented Cornucopia as part of the village’s public life.
Monuments, Hospitals and Holidays
The pattern continued.
The lodge’s first public entertainment, a Town Hall lecture in March 1866 at 25 cents a ticket, cleared $21.50 for the soldiers’ monument fund. The members voted to round the gift up to $25.
In 1867, the lodge bought a picture of George Washington for $9.
On Memorial Day in 1887, a Cornucopia delegation stood with the Grand Master when he laid the cornerstone of Flushing Hospital.
On New Year’s Day 1900, according to an account preserved in the lodge history, 496 people attended its open house.
None of this means Cornucopia ran Flushing. It means the lodge took care to appear where the village gathered: at its hall, its monuments, its hospital and its holidays.
Looking for a Room
For a body that kept showing up in public, Cornucopia had a difficult time finding a settled home.
In February 1868, the secretary proposed renting space in a building Samuel D. Roe planned on Bridge Street—the stretch of today’s Northern Boulevard between Flushing Bridge and Main Street.
The plan fell through.
That April, the members voted unanimously to take a ten-year lease, at $350 a year, in a building to be erected at Main and Washington Streets. They agreed in advance to sublet the room to Pentalpha Chapter on certain nights for $125.
That arrangement fell through too.
In February 1870, the lodge’s public notice still gave its meeting place as the Odd Fellows’ Hall.
Eventually Cornucopia rented from H. Clement on Bridge Street. After the Clement-Bloodgood Building went up in 1872, it leased that building’s third floor.
By 1886, notices called the space the Masonic Hall. It was still a rented floor in someone else’s building.
Those failed leases are useful evidence. They show the lodge negotiating with landlords, waiting on construction and planning to share the cost of rooms with another body.
A lodge was not a building. It was a group of people looking for one.
For the wider physical setting of such arrangements, explore the Masonic Buildings in Queens collection.
The Ladder Beyond Flushing
Cornucopia’s most striking connection to a wider public career was L. Bradford Prince.
Born in Flushing in 1840, Prince served as the lodge’s second Master from 1868 to 1870. The anniversary history records his appointment as district deputy when Queens and Suffolk were organized as a separate Masonic district in September 1868.
His public career carried him to the New York State Assembly and then far beyond Flushing. He became chief justice of the New Mexico Territory and served as its governor from 1889 to 1893.
He died during a visit to Flushing in 1922.
Prince’s path was unusual. The lodge’s broader membership nevertheless placed Cornucopia at the intersection of local professional, civic and political life.
Its 1940 anniversary book names members associated with banking, the courts, utilities and newspapers, along with the entertainer Marshall P. Wilder and scouting pioneer Daniel Carter Beard.
The lodge’s website identifies Beard as a Mason who affiliated with Cornucopia after joining the fraternity elsewhere. That affiliation history should be distinguished from an initiation in Cornucopia itself.
Another member, George U. Harvey, became Borough President of Queens in 1929.
The Borough President Who Did Not Attend
Harvey’s membership produced one of the record’s drier moments.
When the Queens Masonic Association held its charity ball at the Hotel Pennsylvania in November 1929, the Brooklyn Daily Times noted that the borough president, though a Cornucopia member, did not attend.
The newspaper attributed the absence of the borough’s political luminaries to what it called the chaotic state of Queens politics.
A lodge could count a borough president among its members. It could not necessarily bring him to its ball.
Connection Is Not Causation
A list of notable names is not, on its own, a social history.
The names show that Cornucopia brought men with varied public and professional roles into the same institution. They do not establish that membership caused a political appointment, secured a career or guaranteed influence.
The lodge was one setting in which those lives crossed. Its importance lies partly in that regular company, even where the personal consequences remain undocumented.
A Lodge That Helped Other Lodges Grow
As northeast Queens developed, Cornucopia’s membership connections spread with it.
Its 1940 history counted former members among the founders or leaders of:
- Anchor Lodge No. 729.
- Whitestone Lodge No. 973.
- Bayside Lodge No. 999.
- Paumanok Lodge No. 855.
The same account noted that Cornucopia shared its jurisdiction with Service Lodge No. 1009.
These were not necessarily identical institutional relationships. A former member’s part in establishing another lodge should not automatically be treated as a formal parent-and-daughter relationship.
Taken together, however, the names trace the spread of lodge life through northeast Queens.
For another part of that story, read Service Lodge No. 1009 and the Work of Relief in Flushing.
A Temple of Its Own
Cornucopia’s culminating building project was a temple on Broadway—the old name of Northern Boulevard—at Union Street, beside the state armory and a short walk from Town Hall.
According to the lodge’s published history, the cornerstone was laid on June 13, 1908.
The 1940 anniversary book credits Past Master Rupert B. Thomas with sustained work toward the temple’s construction.
After about four decades of rented rooms, Cornucopia had a home of its own.
The date requires a source distinction. The lodge’s timeline gives 1908, while the [New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists’ building record](Masonic Temple - Flushing (Queens), N.Y.
Masonic Temple - Flushing (Queens), N.Y.
describes the temple as built around 1905.
This article follows the lodge’s specific cornerstone date while leaving the building chronology open to further documentary examination.
The temple’s architecture, ownership and later uses belong to the building’s separate history. Here, it marks a change in the lodge’s circumstances: an institution long dependent on landlords had become a property owner.
Membership Through a Changing Century
By its 75th anniversary in 1940, Cornucopia reported that it had raised or admitted 1,489 men over its history and had 570 members.
The figures describe different things. The first is a cumulative total; the second is membership at the time of the anniversary.
The same book reported that Masonic membership in New York State had fallen by more than 96,000 since 1930, a loss it attributed to the Depression.
Flushing was changing too. The subway had reached Main Street in 1928, and the 1939 World’s Fair had risen on the meadows to the west.
The lodge’s anniversary history looked back from a community much larger and more closely connected to the city than the village in which Cornucopia had begun.
The Lodge Outlives the Building
According to Cornucopia’s published timeline, rising real estate taxes led it to sell its temple in 1990.
A church subsequently occupied the building. It was demolished in 2018.
The lodge’s account of the sale and demolition appears in its historical timeline. A later account, “Requiem for the Razed Flushing Cornucopia Masonic Temple”, also discusses the lost building.
Cornucopia Lodge remains active. As confirmed to the author in November 2026, it meets at the Anchor-Astoria temple in College Point.
The connection carries an echo of the lodge’s earlier history: the 1940 book had counted Anchor among the lodges whose beginnings involved former Cornucopia members.
The exact sequence of Cornucopia’s meeting places after the temple sale remains a subject for further research.
Carrying Flushing’s History Forward
Cornucopia began with borrowed regalia, borrowed bylaws and rent paid to another fraternity.
Its members went on to install their officers in public, support a soldiers’ monument fund, appear at a hospital cornerstone and build a temple of their own.
The temple did not survive. The lodge did.
Its history is therefore not simply a rise from rented rooms to property ownership, followed by a loss. It is also a record of institutional continuity across changes of address, membership and neighborhood.
Cornucopia once again meets in rooms belonging to another lodge, carrying its Flushing history with it.
Endnotes and Sources
The Principal Lodge Record
Cornucopia Lodge No. 563, 75th-anniversary program, 1940, pp. 3–7. Borrowed regalia and bylaws; early meetings and petitions; payment of rent to Pacific Lodge of Odd Fellows; 33 men made Masons and 15 petitioners rejected.
Ibid., p. 3. “Confident of their Destiny,” language repeated in the lodge’s later historical account.
Ibid., p. 4. Charter members and occupations; recommendations from Morton Lodge No. 63 and Jamaica Lodge No. 546.
Ibid., pp. 9–10. Constitution, procession to Town Hall, public installation, officers and dinner at Wooley’s Hotel.
Ibid., p. 11. Fee increase on July 12, 1865; 53 members on December 20, 1865; lecture for the soldiers’ monument fund; Washington picture; 1940 membership figures and reported statewide decline.
Ibid., pp. 12–15. Prince’s lodge offices; proposed leases; later rented rooms; Flushing Hospital cornerstone; 1900 open house.
Ibid., pp. 15, 18–19. Notable members, Rupert B. Thomas, connections with other lodges, and acknowledgments to Morton and Jamaica.
Cornucopia’s Published History
Cornucopia Lodge No. 563, “Our History”. September 12, 1864 dispensation; founding claim limited to the village of Flushing; Beard’s affiliation; June 13, 1908 cornerstone; reported 1990 sale and 2018 demolition.
Cornucopia Lodge No. 563 website. Gives June 21, 1865, as the constitution date.
Flushing’s Civic Setting
“Flushing, Queens,” Wikipedia. Supplementary chronology for village incorporation, the railroad and the subway’s arrival at Main Street.
[“Queenswalk: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Boulevard”](Queenswalk: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Boulevard | Brownstoner
Queenswalk: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Boulevard | Brownstoner I love this building. It has a wonderful sense of whimsy and joy to it, and is just a delight to behold. Unlike the usually dour and ponderous town halls of
Brownstoner, April 9, 2014. Town Hall’s 1862 completion and Civil War uses.
“Flushing Town Hall,” Urban Archive, Queens Public Library collection. Building history and Frederick Douglass’s appearance.
Flushing Journal, January 14, 1865. Advertisement for the Frederick Douglass lecture, as identified in the research materials.
“A Look Back at Flushing Town Hall’s History, Saved by Two Women in the ’80s”, Gothamist, August 20, 2019. Town Hall’s civic, military and performance uses.
Members and Public Life
“L. Bradford Prince,” Wikipedia; Social Networks and Archival Context biographical record. Supplementary sources for Prince’s public career.
Kenton County Public Library biography of Daniel Carter Beard. Flushing school-board service.
“George U. Harvey,” Wikipedia. Borough presidency, 1929–1941.
Brooklyn Daily Times, November 23, 1929, p. 5. Queens Masonic Association charity ball and Harvey’s absence.
The Temple and Its Loss
- [“Masonic Temple—Flushing, Queens”](Masonic Temple - Flushing (Queens), N.Y.
Masonic Temple - Flushing (Queens), N.Y.
New York City chapter, American Guild of Organists. Building record giving an approximate construction date of 1905, in conflict with the lodge’s 1908 cornerstone chronology.
“Requiem for the Razed Flushing Cornucopia Masonic Temple”, Flushing.com, March 18, 2019. Temple history, June 13, 1908 cornerstone and demolition.
Present meeting place at the Anchor-Astoria temple in College Point: confirmation supplied to the author, November 2026.
A Note on Dates and Interpretation
Cornucopia dates its beginning from the September 12, 1864 dispensation. Its 1940 anniversary program counts from the 1865 warrant and constitution.
The research materials distinguish three June 1865 events: warrant approval on June 9, constitution on June 21, and charter signature on June 22. These should not be collapsed into a single founding date.
The location of the earliest meetings is unknown. The January 4, 1865 rent payment establishes a relationship with Pacific Lodge of Odd Fellows; it does not conclusively identify every meeting place used during the preceding months.
The charter members’ occupations come from the 1940 program. They support discussion of the founding group, not a complete social profile of the lodge across later decades.
Shared surnames do not establish family relationships. The Lawrence, Willets and Corse identifications require genealogical research before stronger claims can be made.
Prince’s district-deputy appointment follows the lodge history. Examination of the 1868 Grand Lodge proceedings would strengthen the account and establish the precise district designation.
The 1940 program and the lodge’s website differ in their descriptions of William Rasquin Jr. and Rupert B. Thomas. This article does not repeat disputed occupational titles as settled facts.
Beard’s affiliation is attributed to the lodge’s website. His affiliation date has not been established here.
The temple’s specific 1908 cornerstone date follows the lodge. The approximate 1905 date in the organ-history record remains a documentary conflict.
The 1990 sale date and the explanation involving real estate taxes are attributed to the lodge’s own account. A deed and the lodge’s sale records would provide firmer evidence.
The currently available Flushing.com article describes Cornucopia as the first Masonic organization formed in the village of Flushing. It should not be cited as claiming Cornucopia was the first lodge in all of Queens.
Membership and public office are documented connections. Claims that lodge membership caused a political or professional advancement would require additional evidence.
Questions for Further Research
The First Meeting Rooms
Where did Cornucopia meet between September and December 1864? Where was Pacific Lodge’s Odd Fellows’ Hall?
The Flushing Journal and local directories may help identify the premises.
The Clement-Bloodgood Building
Where exactly was the building on Bridge Street, and does any part survive?
Historic atlases, fire-insurance maps and property records could connect the lodge’s descriptions to a modern site.
The Early Officers
Who were the Lawrences, Willets and Corse named in the officer list, and what relationships, if any, connected them to established Flushing families?
The Grand Lodge Record
The proceedings for 1864–1870 could clarify the dispensation, warrant and Prince’s district-deputy appointment.
Membership After 1940
Minute books and annual returns could trace membership changes, the temple-sale decision and the lodge’s later moves.
The College Point Connection
When did Cornucopia begin meeting at the Anchor-Astoria temple, and what rooms did it use between the 1990 sale and that move?
Continue Exploring Queens Lodge History
Another Flushing Lodge
Read Service Lodge No. 1009 and the Work of Relief in Flushing
Explore another institution serving the same community in a later period.
A Different Queens Lineage
Follow the constituent histories that converge in Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
The Buildings Behind the Meetings
Explore Masonic Buildings in Queens
Read the histories of temples, rented lodge rooms and former meeting places as subjects in their own right.
The People Behind the Institutions
Browse Notable Freemasons of Queens
Follow individual lives beyond the names recorded in lodge histories.
The Borough-Wide Directory
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Find other institutional histories across the borough.
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