One Lodge, Six Charters / Island City Lodge No. 586
He began as a telegraph operator at Babylon and rose to sign legal notices for the Long Island Rail Road. Along the way he revived a Long Island City lodge, presided at Theodore Roosevelt’s first Masonic degree, and resigned from the Grand Lodge’s trustees rather than support a debt he believed the Craft had never authorized.
A Railroad Man in the East
In June 1900, the brethren of Island City Lodge No. 586 had reason to be pleased with themselves. Their Master, Frank E. Haff, had just been named District Deputy Grand Master of the First Masonic District, the Grand Master’s representative in every lodge from the East River to Montauk Point.
Island City was one of the largest lodges in the district, yet it had never before supplied a man for that post. Haff would hold both offices at once. He was also an officer of the Long Island Rail Road who had started out at a telegraph key, and over the next several years his railroad life and his lodge life kept crossing, sometimes on the same timetable.
A Voice from the South Shore
He was born in Islip on May 10, 1862, into a family that knew the water. His father was remembered as a coastal pilot, and his uncle, Captain Henry C. Haff, was the Islip skipper who sailed the yacht Defender to victory in the America’s Cup of 1895.
The nephew chose rails over sails. In 1881 he went to work as a telegraph operator at the railroad’s Babylon station, then served as station agent at Islip until 1885.
From there the climb was steady and almost entirely indoors: chief clerk to the general roadmaster, secretary to the general superintendent, general car agent, superintendent of stations. In February 1897 he became assistant treasurer.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad bought a majority interest in the Long Island in 1900 and moved the treasurer’s office to Philadelphia, Haff was elected secretary of the company and its many subsidiaries. His was the signature on the road’s legal notices, and his office at 128 Broadway answered complaints from Brooklyn boards of trade.
His Masonic life began in 1883 at Islip. Not long after, he moved to Long Island City and joined Island City Lodge No. 586, and he brought a good voice with him.
At an Islip campaign meeting in 1888, billed as “of Long Island City,” he sang a solo and was called back for a second. A dozen years later he was singing duets, ushering in full dress and sitting on the dramatic committee of the Queens Borough Histrionic Society alongside Fred T. Hallett and Raymond J. Taylor, while Mrs. Haff served on its social committee.
The Master in the Anteroom
Haff took the East—the Master’s chair—of Island City Lodge in December 1899 and held it for two years. Looking back in 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Times credited him with dispelling “a somewhat lethargic condition” in the lodge and with greatly enlarging its membership. He had mastered the ritual, the paper said, and delivered the degree lectures with such elocutionary effect that members and visitors came back to hear them.
The appointment from Grand Master Charles W. Mead followed within months.
Knowing their Master disliked any fuss, the brethren set a trap. They caught him in the anteroom while the lodge door was guarded, let the Senior Warden take the chair, and had the Junior Deacon announce that Right Worshipful Brother Frank E. Haff was waiting.
He was admitted, escorted to the altar and greeted with the grand honors. The reporter noted that the conspirators needed some time to recover their composure.
In September the lodge did it formally, before a crowded room that included seventy members of Jamaica Lodge, presenting him with a diamond-studded jewel and apron.
From the East River to Montauk
The First District covered Queens, Nassau and Suffolk, and a proper round of visits meant, in the 1902 account, “days and nights of labor and hundreds of miles of traveling.” Some lodges lay so far out that a visitor had to stay the night, because no train would carry him home.
Haff reached every one. When Mead reorganized his staff in 1901 and replaced nearly every deputy in the state, Haff was one of two who kept their posts.
It was here that the railroad and the lodge began to share a schedule.
In October 1901 Haff laid the cornerstone of Jamaica Lodge’s new home, anointing the stone with corn, wine and oil from silver chalices.
For the cornerstone of Peconic Lodge’s Johnson Memorial Hall in Greenport that November, he arranged a special train that left Long Island City at 9:30 in the morning, picked up brethren at Jamaica, Mineola, Hicksville and Riverhead, and ran at a special fare. The newspaper gave him most of the credit for the turnout.
When Grand Lecturer John Laubenheimer came to Morton Lodge in Hempstead for the district convention in January 1902, the railroad again offered a cheap rate from every point on the Island.
His calendar for that season opened at Advance Lodge No. 635 in Astoria on December 3, 1901, and ran out to Sag Harbor, where Wamponamon Lodge followed his visit with an oyster supper.
It was arranged to finish in March at Island City, which one reporter called his “Masonic Alma Mater.”
The Night Theodore Roosevelt Became a Mason
The evening that outlived all the others came on January 2, 1901, at Matinecock Lodge No. 806 in Oyster Bay.
The candidate for the Entered Apprentice degree was Theodore Roosevelt, who had just completed his term as governor of New York and was now vice president-elect. Matinecock’s own Master, Theodore A. Swan, yielded to a roster of visiting dignitaries, and Haff, as District Deputy, presided.
Eighteen of the district’s twenty lodges sent delegations, visitors came from forty-six lodges in all, and the third-floor lodge room in the Oyster Bay Bank building was full. Special trains took the crowd home.
At its next communication Matinecock voted its thanks to the president of the Long Island Rail Road, William H. Baldwin. This was the same Baldwin who in 1897 had presided at an anniversary of the railroad’s YMCA branch, where Haff, as its chairman, gave the opening address.
On April 24, 1901, Haff was back in Oyster Bay among the grand officers at Roosevelt’s raising to the degree of Master Mason.
Ronald J. Seifried recounts the two occasions in [“Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt”](Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt
Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt On January 2, 1901, Vice President elect Theodore Roosevelt began his journey into Freemasonry with the Entered Apprentice Degree
and [“The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt”](The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt
The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt On April 24, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was raised to the degree of Master Mason. The “raising” of Brother Roosevelt took on a different meaning as he reached the third-floor lodge, carried by dozens of brothers.
A Question of Debt
In 1902 Mead nominated Haff a trustee of the Masonic Hall and Asylum Fund, the board that held title to the Grand Lodge’s hall at Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue and oversaw the Masonic Home at Utica.
He was returned in 1905 and served as the board’s secretary. That December he spoke for the trustees in announcing a fireproof building for the lots they had just bought on West Twenty-fourth Street.
Island City, meanwhile, was raising a home of its own. On September 8, 1906, Grand Master Townsend Scudder laid the cornerstone of the lodge’s temple on Jackson Avenue. Haff sat on the committee that arranged the day, and Advance Lodge was the only visiting lodge invited to attend in a body.
Within a year Haff and Scudder stood on opposite sides of the boardroom.
As the Twenty-fourth Street plan grew into a costly temple to be financed by a mortgage of some $700,000, Haff objected that the Craft had never authorized the debt. Scudder asked for his resignation, and on October 12, 1907, Haff sent it with a long letter of reasons.
The lodge rooms in the existing hall, he wrote, earned only a small share of its income. With “one white elephant temple” already on the fraternity’s hands, the trustees had “no moral right” to bind it to another without the Grand Lodge’s approval.
Past Grand Master James Ten Eyck left the board over the same question.
The building went up regardless, grew to eighteen stories, and remains the home of the Grand Lodge of New York. Haff made his case in writing and stepped aside.
Brother at Large
The resignation cost him a title, not his standing. Two months later he administered the obligation during a raising at Alcyone Lodge in Northport.
He had given the historical lecture at a crowded raising in Advance Lodge in May 1903, and that same year his donation started the building fund of Olympia Lodge in Far Rockaway. When Olympia dedicated its temple in January 1911, it was Haff who answered the toast to “The Ladies.”
The railroad kept him just as busy.
He served as secretary of the Queens trolley companies after the Interborough and Long Island interests took them over, worked on the land purchases for the tunnel improvements, and in 1907 read a paper to a Brooklyn YMCA real estate class on how transportation shaped property values.
A later historian credited him with years of work on a corporate history of the road. For two decades he chaired the management committee of the railroad YMCA in Long Island City.
In Kew Gardens, where he lived on Lefferts Avenue, he was an organizer and the first president of the Kew Gardens Country Club, and the member most active in securing its $100,000 clubhouse.
The Last Station
In November 1921 Haff completed forty years with the Long Island Rail Road, by then as its secretary and assistant treasurer.
He died at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan on January 3, 1922, after a brief illness, at fifty-nine. He was living at 233 West Eighty-third Street and left his widow, Bertha, two sons, his mother in Babylon and two brothers.
Services were held at the First Baptist Church at Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway. When the Grand Lodge met that May, his name was among the brethren it remembered, set down as a past Master of Island City Lodge.
Island City’s rolls hold many Masters, but few who carried the lodge so far from its own door.
Haff took the name of a Long Island City lodge into every lodge room between the East River and Montauk, into a packed room in Oyster Bay on a winter night, and into the trustees’ boardroom in Manhattan, where he chose to resign rather than support a debt he believed unauthorized.
He moved freight and money for a living, and he moved Masons too, by the trainload. When his long circuit of the district was drawn up, it ended where it had to: at Island City.
Endnotes and Sources
Masonic Records and Histories
Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York, annual communication of May 1905. Roster of Trustees of the Masonic Hall and Asylum Fund; Committee on Hall.
Ronald J. Seifried, [“Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt”](Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt
Enter the Apprentice: The First Degree of Theodore Roosevelt On January 2, 1901, Vice President elect Theodore Roosevelt began his journey into Freemasonry with the Entered Apprentice Degree
Craftsmen Online.
- Ronald J. Seifried, [“The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt”](The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt
The Raising: The Master Mason Degree of Theodore Roosevelt On April 24, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was raised to the degree of Master Mason. The “raising” of Brother Roosevelt took on a different meaning as he reached the third-floor lodge, carried by dozens of brothers.
Craftsmen Online.
- Matinecock Lodge No. 806, account of Theodore Roosevelt’s degrees drawn from the lodge minutes, reproduced at Electric Scotland.
Contemporary Newspapers
Brooklyn Daily Times: September 22, 1888; November 13, 1895; May 13, 1897; May 19, 1898; June 23, 1900; September 25 and 28, 1900; November 20, 1900; December 6, 1900; October 3, 1901; November 23, 1901; December 2 and 9, 1901; January 25 and February 1, 1902; April 12, 1902; May 7, 1903; September 8, 1906; October 13, 1907; December 11, 1907; September 13 and October 6, 1916; November 29, 1920.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle: May 16, 1903; October 8, 13 and 16, 1907; January 27, 1911; November 1, 1916; January 4, 1922.
Brooklyn Citizen: October 10, 1902; January 4, 1922.
The Evening World (New York): January 4, 1922.
The New York Times: “Belmont and Peters Buy Queens Trolleys,” June 21, 1905; “New Country Club,” July 30, 1916; “1,500 Masons Gather in Grand Lodge Here,” May 3, 1922.
The Chat (Brooklyn): August 18, 1906.
Long Island Farmer: April 1, 1904.
Brooklyn Daily Star: 1898 society note; exact issue date not supplied.
The Daily Review (Hempstead): January 21, 1922.
Railroad, Transit and Organizational Records
Preface to The Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, Counties of Nassau and Suffolk (Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1925), reproduced in The Third Rail Online, Winter 2001.
Vincent F. Seyfried, The Story of the Long Island Electric Railway and the Jamaica Central Railways, 1894–1933 (Hollis, N.Y.: published by the author, 1951).
Vincent F. Seyfried, New York & Long Island Traction Company.
Christopher T. Baer, General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, Its Predecessors and Successors, Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society, May 2015 edition. Birth entry for 1862.
YMCA Yearbook and Official Roster, 1906 and 1907, and a later YMCA Year Book and Official Rosters. Long Island Rail Road branch, Long Island City.
Frank E. Haff, The Effect upon Realty Values of Transportation Development, paper read before the Real Estate Class of the Brooklyn Young Men’s Christian Association, April 15, 1907. Bibliographic listing.
Background and Public Records
Tom Miller, “The Masonic Temple and Masonic Hall,” Daytonian in Manhattan, May 2018.
“Masonic Hall (Manhattan),” Wikipedia.
Herreshoff Marine Museum and America’s Cup Hall of Fame, Henry C. Haff, Class of 2004.
Historical Society of Islip Hamlet marker, “Capt. Hank Haff,” Historical Marker Database.
Find a Grave, memorial 65610420, Frank E. Haff. Records January 3, 1922, as his death date and identifies his spouse as Bertha M. Chrisman.
A Note on the Sources
The account of Haff’s lodge leadership, district visits and 1907 resignation rests principally on the contemporary newspaper reports listed above. The statements about the proposed mortgage and the trustees’ authority describe Haff’s position in the dispute, not an independent legal determination.
Roosevelt’s initiation took place on January 2, 1901, after his term as governor had ended and before his inauguration as vice president. His raising followed on April 24, 1901. These were separate ceremonies.
The Find a Grave memorial places Haff’s burial at Halifax United Methodist Church Cemetery in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. That location has not been confirmed here by an obituary or burial record and is therefore not included in the narrative.
Direct links are provided for the identified Craftsmen Online articles. Other sources retain their bibliographic citations rather than links to unverified archive pages.
Continue the Story
Island City Lodge and Its Long Island City Home
Read the history of Island City Lodge No. 586
Explore the lodge Haff led and the temple whose cornerstone ceremony he helped arrange in 1906.
Advance Lodge and the Astoria Connection
Haff’s district circuit opened at Advance in December 1901. Its brethren later attended Island City’s cornerstone ceremony as the only visiting lodge invited in a body.
