By Brete Murphy · November 10, 2026
Cornucopia Lodge No. 563 did not build its present identity through consolidation. Its history reaches outward instead: through members who helped establish or lead other lodges, through shared rooms and through relationships that now connect its Flushing beginnings with a meeting place in College Point.
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Cornucopia Lodge No. 563 offers a different kind of lineage.
Several of the seven current Queens District lodges combine the histories of institutions that consolidated over time.
Cornucopia does not.
In the record assembled for this project, it has continued under its own charter without absorbing other lodges.
Its connections run outward.
The lodge’s 1940 anniversary program identified former members among the founders or leaders of Anchor, Whitestone, Bayside and Paumanok.
Its temple also accommodated Service Lodge.
Those relationships place Cornucopia within several other histories in this series without making it a constituent lodge in their consolidation trees.
Its own meeting-place history eventually brought it from Flushing to College Point.
The lodge that once supplied people and premises to others now conducts its work in a shared building elsewhere.
A Lodge for the Village of Flushing
Cornucopia began under dispensation in September 1864.
Its charter followed in 1865.
The supplied research distinguishes several stages: warrant approval on June 9, constitution on June 21 and the charter’s signature on June 22.
Those dates describe related but separate actions.
They should not be reduced to a single anniversary date without identifying which event is being commemorated.[1]
The lodge began in rented premises with borrowed regalia.
The anniversary account records a payment to the Odd Fellows for a quarter’s rent in January 1865.
Its founding membership included men working in education, farming, building trades, commerce, banking and law.
Those occupations suggest several points of contact with village life.
They do not establish the social composition of the whole community or show that the lodge represented every part of it.
Cornucopia was an institution within Flushing, not a substitute for the village itself.
Read Cornucopia Lodge No. 563: Borrowed Aprons and the Making of Flushing →
Public Life Beyond the Meeting Room
The 1940 program describes public officer installations at Flushing’s Town Hall and participation in local commemorative and civic occasions.
The lodge’s members also included people whose work extended beyond Flushing.
L. Bradford Prince served as Master before his later political career, which included the governorship of New Mexico Territory.
Other members identified in the supplied history include Daniel Carter Beard and Queens Borough President George U. Harvey.[1]
Their biographies help explain particular connections between lodge membership and public life.
They do not establish that the lodge directed their public work.
The distinction matters throughout this series.
An institution’s history can include the activities of its members without claiming every activity as an institutional undertaking.
Anchor: Assistance Across the Waterways and Roads
Anchor’s own history remembers help from Cornucopia during its early years in College Point.
The account, drawing on Anchor’s Golden Jubilee booklet, describes three Cornucopia men visiting on Tuesday nights to support the lodge’s work.
This is a more specific relationship than a general claim that Cornucopia “founded” Anchor.
The visitors supplied attendance and assistance.
Anchor retained its own institution and charter.[2]
The episode also complicates the picture of separate village lodges.
They had distinct names and communities, but their ability to conduct their work could depend on people arriving from elsewhere.
The connection now has a later counterpart.
Cornucopia meets in Anchor-Astoria’s College Point temple under the author’s present-day account.
That does not make the arrangement a formal repayment of an old obligation.
It places two episodes of practical cooperation within the same history.
Read The Tuesday Night Visitors: Cornucopia and Anchor →
Whitestone, Bayside and Paumanok
Cornucopia’s 1940 program identified former members among the founders or leaders of Whitestone, Bayside and Paumanok.
The wording should remain intact.
“Founders or leaders” is not the same as proof that Cornucopia formally sponsored each lodge or that every organizing member came from it.[1]
Bayside’s connection is particularly visible in the supplied newspaper account.
Its early proceedings took place in Cornucopia’s temple in 1922, and the account described Cornucopia affectionately as the new lodge’s “daddy.”
The expression conveys a relationship.
It does not make Bayside an extension of Cornucopia’s warrant.[3]
Whitestone and Bayside later entered the institutional line now represented by Francis Lewis Lodge No. 273.
Cornucopia remained independent.
Paumanok requires more research. The anniversary program supplies the connection, but the particular members, their roles and the lodge’s local setting need to be established before that relationship can be developed confidently.
Read Francis Lewis: The Number That Traveled East →
Service: A Lodge Within the Temple
Service Lodge No. 1009 was chartered in Flushing in 1923 and met in Cornucopia’s temple, according to the author’s compilation.
This was a relationship through premises.
It should be distinguished from the movement of members into a new lodge and from a later consolidation.
Service retained its own identity while using another lodge’s building.
Its subsequent consolidations led through Service City and Service City Geba into Advance Service Mizpah.[4]
Cornucopia did not accompany it into that institutional line.
The connection survives in the history of the room.
A lodge that never consolidated can therefore appear meaningfully within a consolidation history without becoming one of its absorbed constituents.
Read Advance Service Mizpah’s Lineage Essay →
A Temple of Its Own
Cornucopia eventually moved from rented premises to a building of its own on Broadway, now Northern Boulevard, at Union Street.
The supplied research dates the cornerstone to June 13, 1908.
That date should not be replaced by an approximate construction date from a later building summary.
Different sources may describe planning, construction, cornerstone laying or completion.[1]
By 1940, the anniversary program reported 570 current members.
Its separate cumulative admissions figure of 1,489 described the number admitted over the lodge’s history, not the number then on the roll.
Keeping those figures distinct prevents an exaggerated picture of the lodge’s size.
The temple accommodated Cornucopia’s own work and the activities of other occupants.
Its usefulness extended beyond a single lodge’s meetings.
The 1990 Sale
Cornucopia’s own history attributes the 1990 sale of its temple to high real estate taxes.
That is the lodge’s explanation and should remain identified as such.
The supplied material does not establish whether the sale followed a particular financial crisis, a negotiated decision, a foreclosure proceeding or some combination of circumstances.
Minutes, accounts and deed records are needed to reconstruct the decision.[1]
The building subsequently had church use and was demolished in 2018, according to the supplied building history.
The sale and the demolition were separate events, decades apart.
Neither should be used as shorthand for the other.
Cornucopia’s institutional history continued after it ceased owning the temple.
The Whitestone Years and the Move to College Point
The meeting-place chronology after 1990 remains incomplete.
The author’s account places Cornucopia at the Whitestone Masonic Temple for a period before its present College Point arrangement.
The date when that occupancy began has not yet been established here.
Whitestone’s building had originated with a lodge whose history Cornucopia’s anniversary program linked to former members.
That relationship gives the later occupancy historical resonance, but it does not fill the missing dates.
The author’s November 2026 account states that the Whitestone temple became reserved for the German Masonic District at the end of the Masonic year in June 2024.
The same account places Cornucopia and Harmony’s first meetings in College Point in September 2024.[5]
Cornucopia now meets at 18-14 College Point Boulevard alongside Anchor-Astoria, Harmony and Francis Lewis under that account.
The shared address does not combine their charters.
Read Anchor-Astoria: Six Lodge Histories Across Queens →
What an Outward Lineage Shows
Cornucopia’s history connects several different kinds of relationship.
Former members helped establish or lead other institutions.
Visitors supported another lodge’s work.
A temple accommodated a separate lodge.
Later, Cornucopia used buildings associated with institutions connected to its earlier history.
These relationships should not all be called descent.
Together, however, they show how an independent lodge participated in a wider network.
The history also separates continuity from property ownership.
Cornucopia retained its identity after selling its Flushing temple.
Its charter did not depend on keeping one address.
The building history changed. The institution continued.
From Providing Space to Sharing It
Cornucopia’s place in this series is not a merger tree with several branches converging on one surviving name.
It is a network of people, rooms and assistance.
That network reaches into Anchor-Astoria, Francis Lewis and Advance Service Mizpah while Cornucopia remains separate from all three.
Its present meeting place supplies a final connection rather than an endpoint.
A lodge once sustained by its own Flushing premises now works in a shared College Point temple.
The earlier record shows Cornucopia helping others conduct their work.
The present arrangement shows why access to another institution’s building can matter just as much as owning one.
Endnotes
1. Cornucopia’s Institutional and Building History
Cornucopia Lodge No. 563, seventy-fifth-anniversary program, 1940, particularly pages 3–19, as used in the author’s research.
The lodge website timeline and the author’s main Cornucopia article.
Flushing.com, March 18, 2019, concerning the former temple.
These sources support the beginnings, occupational references, civic connections, reported membership figures and building chronology summarized here.
The 1940 figure of 570 is current membership. The figure of 1,489 is cumulative admissions.
The explanation of the 1990 sale is attributed to the lodge.
2. Anchor and the Cornucopia Visitors
Anchor-Astoria Lodge No. 729, “History,” drawing on Anchor’s Golden Jubilee booklet.
See The Tuesday Night Visitors.
The account establishes assistance by named visitors rather than a consolidation or shared charter.
3. Bayside
Times Union, May 14, 1922, as used in the author’s Francis Lewis series, Part 5.
Supports the early use of Cornucopia’s temple and the reported “daddy” description.
The expression is retained as contemporary language, not a formal institutional category.
4. Service
The author’s Advance Service Mizpah series and Grand Lodge compilation.
Service’s occupancy of Cornucopia’s temple is distinguished from its later consolidations.
Cornucopia did not become a constituent of Advance Service Mizpah.
5. Recent Meeting Places
Brete Murphy, November 2026 account.
Supplies the Whitestone arrangement’s conclusion in June 2024 and the September 2024 move to College Point.
The start of Cornucopia’s Whitestone occupancy and its complete meeting-place sequence after 1990 remain unresolved.
6. Scope of the Lineage Essay
The supplied record treats Cornucopia as continuing without consolidation.
The article distinguishes:
- Founding and leadership connections.
- Visiting assistance.
- Shared premises.
- Formal consolidation.
The phrase “founders or leaders” follows the 1940 program.
The essay does not treat every connected lodge as a formally sponsored daughter institution.
Questions for Further Research
- Where did Cornucopia meet immediately after the 1990 sale?
- When did it begin meeting at Whitestone?
- Which former members helped establish or lead Paumanok?
- What roles did those members hold?
- What was Cornucopia’s peak membership?
- What was its membership in 1990?
- What do the minutes, accounts and deed records show about the sale?
- Did the lodge discuss consolidation with another institution?
- What records document the 2024 meeting-place arrangements?
Continue Through the Cornucopia Series
- Cornucopia Lodge No. 563: Borrowed Aprons and the Making of Flushing
- The Tuesday Night Visitors: Cornucopia and Anchor
Follow the Connections
- Francis Lewis: The Number That Traveled East
- Anchor-Astoria: Six Lodge Histories Across Queens
- Advance Service Mizpah: Six Lodge Histories
- Service Lodge No. 1009
- Connecting Stories Across the Queens District’s Seven Lodges
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