One Lodge, Six Charters / Mizpah Lodge No. 738
Born in a Dutch Reformed parsonage on the Flushing turnpike, Garret J. Garretson opened Mizpah Lodge in his own law office in 1873, spent more than three decades in judicial office, and in 1910 was carried back into office by his home borough when his party’s ticket went down around him.
A Son of the Parsonage
In the summer of 1847, old Newtown was still a village of farms, churchyards and a single crossroads where the Flushing turnpike met the road to Jamaica. On July 16 of that year, in the parsonage of the Reformed Dutch Church on the Newtown and Flushing turnpike, a boy was born to the Reverend Garret I. Garretson and his wife, Catherine Rapelje. They named him Garret James. Sixty years later the house was still standing, and the boy had become a Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.
He came from two of the oldest strands in the history of New Netherland. On his father’s side the family traced itself to Gerrit Gerritsen, who left Wageningen in the Dutch province of Gelderland in 1660 and settled across the harbor in New Jersey. On his mother’s side he descended from Joris Jansen de Rapalje, a Walloon refugee who reached the colony in 1623 and became one of the early landholders of Brooklyn. His mother’s grandfather had been a major in the Revolution and fought in the Battle of Long Island. Her father, Daniel Rapelje, left New Lots for Newtown, farmed, and ran a gristmill and a sawmill.
The Reverend Garretson came to Newtown in 1833 and from 1835 served as co-pastor with the long-serving Reverend Jacob Schoonmaker, who for decades had ministered to both the Jamaica and Newtown congregations. Both men resigned in 1849, and the two churches went their separate ways. The minister took his family to Seneca County in upstate New York, where he died in August 1858. His widow then brought the children home to Newtown. Garret was about eleven. He would live in Newtown, later called Elmhurst, for the rest of his life, and his father’s grave remains the only pastor’s grave in that churchyard.
The Making of a Lawyer
Garretson attended the village schools of Newtown and New Jersey and then the Flushing Institute under Professor Fairchild, one of the respected private academies of Queens County. He read law in Manhattan with the firm of Marvin & Daniel and was admitted to the bar in December 1869, at twenty-two.
He did not wait long for public work. In the early 1870s, before he was thirty, he was elected School Commissioner for the Second District of Queens County, which took in the schools of Newtown, Jamaica and Hempstead. For fifteen years he also served as President of the Newtown Board of Education. The schoolhouse was the first public institution he served, and he never lost his attachment to it.
In 1876 he married Eliza Leggett Eastman, daughter of Henry W. Eastman of Roslyn, one of the leading lawyers of Queens and New York counties. The following year he joined his father-in-law in practice. The partnership of Eastman and Garretson lasted until Henry Eastman’s death in 1882, after which Eastman’s sons came into the firm, which continued until 1896.
A Lodge Is Born in a Law Office
In 1873 a Newtown Mason who wanted to attend lodge had a long trip ahead of him: to Jamaica Lodge No. 546, to Cornucopia Lodge No. 563 in Flushing, to Island City Lodge No. 586 at Hunters Point, or to Advance Lodge No. 635 in Astoria. Nine Master Masons decided that the village deserved a lodge of its own. Most of them belonged to Island City Lodge, and their leader was a twenty-five-year-old lawyer named Garret J. Garretson.
On February 13, 1873, Grand Master Christopher G. Fox granted a dispensation for Mizpah Lodge. Garretson was named Master, with S. Fisk Worthington as Senior Warden and Samuel Douglass as Junior Warden. The other founders were Thomas Anderton, James Cating, Robert M. Donaldson, John H. Jebens, Abel Powell and Charles A. Anderson. Two weeks later, on the evening of Thursday, February 27, 1873, Mizpah Lodge U.D. held its first communication in Garretson’s law office.
The new lodge borrowed what it needed from its parent. Island City Lodge had helped the Newtown brethren obtain their dispensation, so Mizpah adopted Island City’s by-laws for use while under dispensation. Within six weeks the founders had fitted out lodge rooms on the top floor of the Jebens Building on Broadway, opposite the old Newtown Court House, with furnishings they paid for themselves at a cost of $529.11. At the first meeting in the new rooms, Island City Lodge presented Mizpah with a Holy Bible and a Square and Compasses. According to the lodge’s centennial history, every Master of Mizpah had taken his obligation on that Bible, beginning with the first.
The Grand Lodge chartered Mizpah Lodge No. 738 in June 1873, and the ceremony of constitution was performed by Deputy Grand Master Elwood E. Thorne, acting as Grand Master. Garretson was the lodge’s first Master under the charter. Its first officers included his brother George W. Garretson as organist and a C. Rapalye, who shared his mother’s family name, as marshal.
He served as Master from 1873 through 1876, and by the time he left the East the lodge had grown to thirty-nine Master Masons. Mizpah called him back to the chair in 1878. In 1881 he was serving as the lodge’s Treasurer under George M. Williamson, the husband of his sister, who would become District Deputy Grand Master for the district in 1885. Mizpah was a lodge of neighbors and relatives, and the Garretsons were at the center of it.
Into the New Century
A quarter century after the meeting in his law office, Mizpah Lodge had become an institution of old Newtown. Its officers laid the cornerstones of public buildings, including Public School 11 in Woodside. In 1898 two milestones arrived together: Newtown became part of the new City of New York, and Mizpah reached its twenty-fifth year. On June 27, 1898, the lodge invited its first Master back to the East to preside over the anniversary ceremonies. The young lawyer of 1873 was now a Justice of the Supreme Court.
The lodge grew with the borough around it. It moved to Arcanum Hall on Broadway in 1905, and in 1916 it bought a site for a temple of its own. On January 1, 1920, the cornerstone of the new Mizpah Temple was laid at Warner Avenue and Ketcham Place, and the Brooklyn Daily Times reminded its readers that Justice Garretson had been one of the lodge’s organizers and its first Master. Grand Master Robert H. Robinson dedicated the temple on March 17, 1921, at what is now 87-11 Whitney Avenue in Elmhurst.
Garretson never drifted away from his lodge. For many years he presided in the East at Mizpah’s annual Past Masters’ Night. The Brooklyn Daily Times recorded that his last public appearance came in November 1921, when he addressed the Eastern Star chapter in Elmhurst, the chapter whose women had helped raise money for the new temple.
The Garretson name stayed in the lodge after him. In June 1933 his nephew, Nathaniel V. Garretson, was appointed District Deputy Grand Master for the First Queens District.
Thirty-Three Years in Judicial Office
Garretson’s judicial career began with a vacancy. In 1880 Governor Alonzo B. Cornell appointed him Surrogate of Queens County to succeed Alexander Hagner, who had died in office. He served nine months and was not returned at the next election. In 1885 he ran for County Judge of Queens and won, taking office in 1886 and running well ahead of the rest of the Republican ticket. He was re-elected in 1891.
The Brooklyn Daily Times, endorsing him that fall, recalled a charge he had given to a Queens grand jury, in which he told jurors that public officials should be examples of purity and probity in public office. The paper said no man would dare question his motives, character or record.
In June 1896 Governor Levi P. Morton named him to the commission that drafted the charter for the consolidated City of Greater New York. That September the Republican judicial convention for the Second District met in Brooklyn and nominated him for the Supreme Court. When William J. Youngs placed his name before the delegates for Queens, the hall broke into prolonged cheering. Garretson was elected in November and resigned as County Judge and as charter commissioner to take his seat. For the next twenty-one years he held trial and special terms across the district, from Brooklyn and Richmond to Westchester, Orange, Rockland and Dutchess.
A year later, in 1897, he married again. His first wife, Eliza, had died on December 17, 1888, leaving him with four young children. His second wife was Sara Wilson, daughter of Garret Van Sinderen Wilson of Somerset County, New Jersey, the region his father’s family had come from.
The Election of 1910
The fight Garretson remembered best came at the end of his first term. In 1910 the Republicans renominated him, but the Democrats, who controlled their judicial convention, refused to endorse him, arguing that he would reach the constitutional age limit of seventy in only seven years. They named Patrick M. E. Callahan of Brooklyn in his place.
Garretson ran anyway, as the Republican nominee and with the endorsement of the Independence League, the Citizens’ Union, the Prohibition Party, the Citizens’ Non-Partisan Judiciary Nominators and a Citizens’ Committee of 100. That November, John A. Dix led a Democratic landslide in the governor’s race and carried the judicial district by some 37,000 votes. Garretson was the only Republican nominee elected in the district. He beat Callahan by more than 4,500 votes and carried Queens by a large plurality.
“The people came to my rescue,” he said years later, and he added that he was proud of the fight, disagreeable as it had been.
At Seventy
The age limit the Democrats had pointed to arrived on July 16, 1917. Under the state constitution, Garretson would leave the bench at the end of the year. That September a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle visited him in the library of his home on Broadway in Elmhurst. He found the judge surrounded by law books, arranged so carefully that he could put his hand on any one of them at once.
Asked about compulsory retirement, Garretson observed that some men begin to die at the top and some begin to die at the bottom: some lose their minds first, some their legs. Many judges forced out at seventy, he said, could still do a good day’s work. The Eagle wrote that his retirement would be keenly felt by lawyers and laymen alike, and that he had been regarded as a strictly just and impartial judge.
He left the Supreme Court on December 31, 1917, after a judicial career contemporary accounts described as thirty-three years. The Queens County bar honored him with a reception, and he was appointed an official referee. He was a member of the Union League Club of New York, the Hamilton and Brooklyn clubs of Brooklyn, and the Exempt Firemen’s Association of Newtown. He also belonged to the Holland Society, the organization of descendants of New Netherland families, and served as its president in 1905 and 1906.
Final Summer
In July 1922 Garretson was spending the summer with his wife at Amagansett, near the eastern tip of Long Island. On the night of July 9, after an illness of two days, he died of heart failure at the age of seventy-four. His body was brought home to the Garretson homestead at Broadway and Pettit Place in Elmhurst, a short walk from the church where his father had preached. He was buried in Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens.
He was survived by his wife, Sara, and the four children of his first marriage: Lydia Macy Denton of New Hyde Park; Mary Lloyd Eastman of Roslyn; Grace Eastman Jackson of Scarsdale; and James Garretson, a Wall Street lawyer with Evarts, Choate & Sherman. The Brooklyn Daily Times wrote that few men on the bench had enjoyed more of the esteem of their colleagues and the confidence of the public, and it described him as a man of modest bearing and gracious manner.
Sara Wilson Garretson lived until 1959. In her husband’s memory she founded a library at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, where a student society, the Garretson Scribe, grew up around it. The judge who had begun his public life as a school commissioner was remembered, in the end, in a school.
The First Name on the Roll
Mizpah Lodge No. 738 went on to share a temple with Geba Lodge, to consolidate with Island City Lodge, the lodge that had given it its first Bible, and finally to join Advance Lodge as Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586. Through every one of those changes, the roll of Mizpah’s Masters has begun with the same name.
Garret J. Garretson saw old Newtown become Elmhurst, and Elmhurst become part of the largest city in the country. He served it as a school commissioner, a county judge, a framer of the city charter and a justice of the state’s highest trial court. Before most of that work, on a February evening in 1873, he opened his law office to eight brothers so that their village could have a lodge of its own. The lodge’s centennial history preserved the story of the Bible that Island City gave it that spring, and of the successive Masters who took their obligation upon it.
Endnotes and Sources
Newspapers and Contemporary Accounts
“G. J. Garretson, Jurist, Dies at 74,” The New York Times, July 11, 1922. Listed in the newspaper’s archive index for that date.
“Garret Garretson, Formerly Justice, Dies at Age of 74,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 10, 1922, p. 3.
“G. J. Garretson, Former Justice, Dies Suddenly,” Brooklyn Daily Times, July 10, 1922, p. 1. Includes his service as first Master of Mizpah, Past Masters’ Night appearances, last public appearance before the Eastern Star and homestead at Broadway and Pettit Place.
Editorial, “Garret J. Garretson,” Brooklyn Daily Times, July 11, 1922, p. 6.
“Justice Garretson Soon to Retire,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 1917, p. 59. Interview covering the 1910 election, Greater New York Charter Commission and family.
“Of Ancient Lineage,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 8, 1910, p. 64; Brooklyn Daily Times, May 23, 1908, p. 19. Parsonage birth, ancestry, education, marriages and Holland Society service.
“Four Judges Nominated,” New-York Tribune, September 27, 1896, p. 3; Brooklyn Citizen, September 26, 1896, p. 2; Brooklyn Daily Times convention report, 1896.
Brooklyn Daily Times, October 30, 1891, p. 5. County Judge endorsement and grand-jury charge.
Daily Long Island Democrat, September 20, 1911, p. 18; Louis Windmueller, letter to the editor, The New York Times, October 28, 1910.
Brooklyn Daily Times, March 9, 1907, p. 16. Newtown Reformed Church’s 175th anniversary and the Reverend G. I. Garretson. Also Brooklyn Daily Times, February 15, 1902, p. 9, funeral of Daniel Rapelje Garretson, naming his brothers and sister.
Assignment lists of the Appellate Division, Second Department: Times Union, November 30, 1898; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 20, 1901.
“Mrs. G. J. Garretson,” The New York Times, April 5, 1959.
Biographical Reference
- The Political Graveyard: Garret James Garretson. Lists his birth and death dates, elected and appointed offices, marriages and burial at Maple Grove Cemetery.
Lodge Histories and Records
Mizpah Lodge No. 738 officer history, 1881, from the history of the town of Newtown.
“Mizpah Lodge, F. and A. M.,” Brooklyn Daily Times, November 10, 1900, p. 9.
Mizpah Lodge No. 738, 100th Anniversary lodge history, 1973.
“Elmhurst Plans Big Masonic Day,” Brooklyn Daily Times, December 31, 1919, p. 9; “Mizpah Lodge Bazaar Opens,” Brooklyn Daily Times, October 25, 1920, p. 7.
Grand Lodge of New York records for Mizpah Lodge’s charter date, via the lodge lineage records of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
A Note on the Sources
- The research notes describe Garretson as Master of Mizpah again in 1900, but the sources listed here do not support that term. The 1881 lodge history gives his service as 1873–1876 and again in 1878. The Brooklyn Daily Times of November 10, 1900 names James D. Dillingham as Master that year.
- The documented anniversary appearance is June 27, 1898, when Garretson presided in the East for Mizpah’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Presiding at an anniversary or Past Masters’ Night should not be confused with holding another elected term as Master.
- Grand Lodge records give Mizpah’s charter date as June 20, 1873. The centennial history’s June 27 appears to refer to the constitution ceremony. The 1900 newspaper’s “1878” charter date is a misprint.
- Newspapers gave Garretson’s age at death as both seventy-four and seventy-five. Born July 16, 1847, and dying July 9, 1922, he was seventy-four.
- His 1910 margin over Callahan is given as more than 4,500 in his own account and in the obituaries. The 1911 Long Island Democrat figure of more than 10,000 likely refers to his plurality in Queens alone.
- His school-commissioner service is dated both 1872–1875 and 1873–1875. He took office as County Judge in 1886 after his election in 1885.
- Contemporary accounts describe thirty-three years in judicial office. That figure encompasses service in more than one judicial position and should not be read as thirty-three years on the Supreme Court alone; his Supreme Court service ran from 1897 through 1917.
- The New York Times says he resigned as official referee in 1920, while the Brooklyn Daily Times describes him as serving in that post when he died. This article does not resolve the discrepancy.
- Accounts place his paternal ancestor’s settlement at Bergen Point, Communipaw or New Brunswick, and give the Rapalje origin as La Rochelle or Brittany. The narrative stays general where the accounts differ.
- A 1908 account says the Rapaljes left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, decades after Joris Rapalje’s reported arrival in New Netherland. That detail has been omitted.
- No source establishes how the 1873 marshal, C. Rapalye, was related to Garretson’s mother.
- The centennial history’s account of successive Masters using the Bible presented by Island City is a historical statement. Its continued use today should be confirmed from current lodge records before being asserted as a present practice.
Continue the Story
Garretson’s law office was the starting point of a lodge whose history became part of a much larger Queens lineage.
- Mizpah’s Watchtower in Old Newtown: The Story of Mizpah Lodge No. 738 — Follow the lodge Garretson helped establish, from its earliest meetings to its place in the later lineage.
- Island City Lodge No. 586 and the Temple That Served the City — Explore the lodge that helped Mizpah obtain its dispensation and presented its first Bible, Square and Compasses.
- Early Newtown, Queens: From Mespat to Modern Queens — Discover the community of churches, farms and village institutions in which Garretson grew up.
Another Life in Law and the Lodge
Brother John Anderson Leach of Advance Lodge No. 635 — Read about another Queens lawyer, magistrate and past master whose public service crossed the borough’s legal and civic institutions.
