He was the lodge's 201st member and a charter member of Richmond Hill Lodge. In between, he wrote down much of what Queens was doing.
In October 1892, a newspaper reporter from Long Island City became the 201st member of Advance Lodge No. 635 in Astoria. More than two decades later, as Queens pushed outward and new lodges sprang up behind the new neighborhoods, the same man turned up as a charter member of Richmond Hill Lodge. Ezra Newton Dodson spent his working life recording a place that never stopped rearranging itself, and the lodge rolls show him belonging to institutions that gave that place some continuity. The two threads ran side by side for the better part of thirty years. (1, 3)
A Reporter Takes the Third Degree
On October 25, 1892, Dodson was raised to Master Mason. He was thirty. The lodge listed him as a news reporter, born in Philadelphia, living in Long Island City. (1)
He was not alone that evening. Edgar C. Foster, twenty-six and a lawyer of Long Island City, was raised with him. Four years earlier, in April 1888, another Long Island City lawyer named Walter C. Foster, then twenty-three, had received the same degree. The records do not say whether the two Fosters were related, but the pattern is suggestive enough: Advance Lodge was drawing from the working professions of the town around it, and a man whose job was to know that town fit right in. (2)
A Birthday Without a Year
Dodson's own papers disagree about when and where he began. Every obituary agrees on September 1 for the day. The year is another matter: the Brooklyn Daily Times said 1861, the New York Herald said 1862, and the Brooklyn Eagle said 1863. Age at death was given as fifty-five in some accounts and fifty-six in a headline. Most obituaries put his birthplace at West Penn, Pennsylvania, while the lodge, at his raising, wrote down Philadelphia. The lodge's age of thirty in 1892 sits most comfortably with the middle of those years, though nothing here settles it. (1, 4, 5, 9)
What the obituaries agree on is the shape of his youth. His father, Oliver Perry Dodson, was a contractor in the Pennsylvania coal country, and one account credits him with work on the Lehigh Canal. The son worked around the mines as a boy, learned to set type in Mahanoy City, and drifted through Scranton and Bayonne, New Jersey, doing editorial work along with typesetting. A Bayonne paper remembered him fondly in 1888, saying his training there was paying off on the New York dailies. It added, almost as an aside, that he was something of a singer. (4, 5, 9, 12)
He also went to sea as a teenager, and he worked on a Jacksonville paper. By the Evening World's account, a sketch he wrote of the South Seas caught the attention of Charles A. Dana at The Sun. Accounts vary on the details, but they agree that the road to New York ran through Dana's office. (6, 9)
The Sun's Man on Borden Avenue
From there the career is easy to follow, because it was printed. He covered Staten Island and Westchester County for The Sun, then Long Island, and he helped build a suburban news service that eventually served other New York papers. In 1900 and again in 1903, The Sun's own branch-office listings gave its Long Island City address on Borden Avenue with Dodson's name beside it. The Herald later said he had represented the paper there for more than twenty years. (9, 13)
He also started his own paper. The Queens County Herald, which he founded and edited, drew comment from political men across the island, and the Brooklyn Daily Times said it carried wide influence in Queens politics. Dodson was active in Republican circles, though the Times noted he never held office. When the Herald folded, he traveled west for a stretch, working for papers in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and then came back to Long Island City. Over the years he filed for the Times, the Evening World, and the Standard Union, among others. (5, 6, 7, 9)
Writing the Explosion
One of his bylines from outside the usual beat survives. In June 1901, the Buffalo Courier ran his Sunday feature “Submarine Mines in Action,” about the Army's mine-testing at Willets Point, Sandy Hook, and Newport. It is a reporter's piece: he explains how observers on shore fixed a moving ship's position by triangulation, then describes an old schooner sent drifting over a mine field and blown skyward on command. In another passage a mine is set off under frozen water, and the ice flies up like glittering glass. The scene he lingers on is a display of explosions on the Sound, watched from two miles away, where what struck him was the silence before the shock arrived. The man who wrote that was paying close attention to what the eye gets before the ear does. (14)
Names on the Committee Lists
Dodson's name keeps appearing where Queens organized itself. Papers placed him on the committee lists for a large celebration in June 1913. In June 1915, as the Queens subway neared its opening, he was on a Long Island City Business Men's Association committee that met Interborough officials and worked up advertising for the occasion. (17, 19)
In between, the real estate pages carried him in 1904 and 1905 as a seller of lots in Long Island City, and in 1913 the Jamaica police-court news named him as owner of an Oldsmobile at the center of a quarrel involving his nephew. A 1909 society item has him giving the presentation speech at that nephew's birthday and engagement party, which is the closest the clippings get to the family man behind the reporter. He never married. A brother and two sisters survived him. (15, 18, 16, 4, 5, 9)
The Charter List at Richmond Hill
At some point he moved from Long Island City to Richmond Hill, and the Masonic story moved with him. The Brooklyn Daily Times said he joined Advance Lodge about thirty years before his death and was a charter member of Richmond Hill Lodge No. 892, which had been organized about three years earlier. That is a modest sentence for a significant move. A man who had come into the craft at Astoria helped found a lodge in the fast-growing district where he now lived, and the older lodge's membership became part of the newer one's beginnings. (3, 5)
The same obituaries describe a second community. Dodson helped organize the Christian Science society at Richmond Hill and was a charter member of its First Church of Christ, Scientist, serving as Sunday School superintendent, chairman of the trustees, and a member of the building committee. (5, 11)
Thirty-Two or Thirty-Three
The obituaries also differ on his Masonic rank. The Times, The Chat, and the Standard Union call him a thirty-second degree Mason, with membership in the New York Consistory of the Scottish Rite and in Mecca Temple of the Mystic Shrine. The Brooklyn Eagle alone calls him a thirty-third degree Mason. The surviving clippings do not resolve the question, and the safest reading is that most of the press placed him at the thirty-second degree, with the Scottish Rite and the Shrine both firmly attached to his name. (4, 5, 7, 11)
What the Pencil Left Behind
Dodson died on February 5, 1917, in St. Mary's Hospital, of pneumonia that set in after an operation. Shortly before, he had moved to Manhattan. The news ran in Brooklyn and Manhattan papers alike, and the Brooklyn Daily Times, which had counted on him for decades, said he aided progress through constructive criticism and “fearless exposure of what was bad.” Funeral services were held in Flushing, and burial followed in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. (5, 7, 8, 9, 10)
Lodge histories tend to follow the men who presided. Dodson's name sits further down the roll, number 201, a reporter listed beside two young lawyers on an October evening. But a place is only remembered if someone wrote it down while it was happening, and for the Queens of his day that was often Dodson. His membership in Advance Lodge No. 635 ran alongside that work, and when Queens grew a new lodge in a new neighborhood, his name was on its charter.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635 membership records: Ezra Newton Dodson, 201st member, raised to Master Mason October 25, 1892, age 30; listed as news reporter, born in Philadelphia, residing in Long Island City. Return to text
- Advance Lodge No. 635 membership records: Edgar C. Foster, age 26, lawyer, Long Island City, raised October 25, 1892; Walter C. Foster, age 23, lawyer, Long Island City, raised April 25, 1888. Return to text
- Richmond Hill Lodge membership: Dodson listed as charter member. Return to text
Obituaries and Death Notices
- Brooklyn Eagle, February 5, 1917, “Ezra Newton Dodson.” Return to text
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, February 5, 1917, “Ezra N. Dodson Dies, Aged 56,” and editorial “Ezra N. Dodson.” Return to text
- The Evening World, February 5, 1917. Return to text
- Times Union (Brooklyn), February 5, 1917, “Death of Ezra N. Dodson, Veteran Newspaper Man,” and February 6, 1917, funeral notice. Return to text
- The New York Times, February 6, 1917, “Ezra Newton Dodson.” Return to text
- New York Herald, February 6, 1917, “Ezra N. Dodson.” Return to text
- New-York Tribune, February 7, 1917, funeral notice. Return to text
- The Chat (Brooklyn), February 10, 1917, obituary and local notice. Return to text
Newspapers, Career and Civic Life
- The Bayonne Herald and Greenville Register, April 28, 1888, and an undated local item. Return to text
- New York Herald, September 9, 1894; January 21, 1900; and January 31, 1903, branch office listings of The Sun. Return to text
- Buffalo Courier, June 23, 1901, “Submarine Mines in Action,” by E. N. Dodson. Return to text
- Brooklyn Eagle and The Brooklyn Daily Times, March 29, 1904, and Brooklyn Eagle, April 12, 1905, real estate transfers. Return to text
- Brooklyn Eagle, May 2, 1909, social notice. Return to text
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 7, 1913, celebration committee lists. Return to text
- Brooklyn Eagle and The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 14, 1913, automobile court reports. Return to text
- The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 14, 1915, “Queens Subway Open To-Morrow.” Return to text
Double-click to edit...
