Raised a Mason in 1856, ten years before Advance Lodge began, John E. Oloff brought a shipwright's exactness to a new lodge's ritual, and the lodge remembers him as a teacher.
John E. Oloff was a Swedish-born ship carpenter who had been a Mason for about ten years before Advance Lodge No. 635 existed, and a new lodge in Astoria had use for a head start like that. He was raised in 1856, joined a second New York lodge in 1858, and stood among the charter members when Advance was organized in 1867. The lodge remembers him less as an officeholder than as a teacher, a man whose influence worked mostly inside the lodge room. That kind of influence rarely reaches the newspapers. A ledger entry, a line in a Brooklyn paper, and a death notice in the Times mark the outline, and the lodge's own memory fills it in. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
A Carpenter Raised in 1856
The lodge's record of him is compact. John E. Oloff, aged 39, native of Sweden, ship carpenter. He was raised on May 23, 1856, in Silentia Lodge No. 198. (1)
Ship carpentry is joinery under load. Planks have to meet, frames have to hold, and a seam that is nearly right will leak. Masonic ritual asks something like that of the people who learn it, since the work has to be delivered as it was received. No document ties the two, and the comparison is only an observer's, but a man with a shipwright's habits would have felt at home with a ritual that asks to be done exactly.
Two Lodges Before Astoria
On January 13, 1858, Oloff affiliated with Polar Star Lodge No. 245 in New York City. Affiliation is the formal step by which a Mason becomes a member of a lodge other than the one that raised him, and it normally follows a change in where the man lives or works. The record gives no reason for his move, so the reason should not be guessed at. (1)
What it does show is that by the time Advance Lodge appeared, Oloff had belonged to two lodges, one of them for nearly a decade. Most of the founders in Astoria were building a lodge for the first time. He had already seen how two older ones ran.
Second on the Roll
Advance Lodge worked under dispensation in 1866 and received its charter in 1867. Munsell's history dates its organization to February 22, 1867, and prints a roll of twenty-one charter members. Oloff's name is second, behind John R. Clark, who heads Munsell's list of masters. Further down are a Civil War captain, a blacksmith and fire chief, a future supervisor, and the engineer known for clearing the rocks of Hell Gate. (3)
Dispensation and charter are different steps, and the months between them are when a lodge learns whether it can do its work correctly. A founder with ten years of experience was well placed to help with that.
The Trustees' Bench
Years later, the Brooklyn Union of December 28, 1876, printed the year's Masonic elections lodge by lodge, a feature newspapers ran every winter. Under “Advance Lodge, of Astoria,” the list read: Edwin A. Cadwell, master; William M. Berger, senior warden; George Caffray, junior warden; James M. Whitcomb, treasurer; Stephen Hempstead, secretary. The trustees were John E. Oloff, John Kaufman, and Benjamin Moore. (4)
Cadwell, Berger, and Whitcomb were all on the 1867 charter roll. Nine years after the founding, three of the founders were holding the lodge's top offices, and a fourth was a trustee, one of the men entrusted with the lodge's property and finances. The founding generation had not handed the lodge off to anyone else. (3, 4)
What the Lodge Remembers
The lodge's own account of Oloff is warmer than the ledger. It describes him as a charter member, a Master over multiple terms, and a long-serving Treasurer. It remembers him as one of the most knowledgeable ritualists of his era and as a patient teacher of candidates, whose influence was strongest inside the lodge, where he helped shape its standards, customs, and continuity. In local memory, it says, he stood as a model of old Astoria Masonry. (2)
A ritualist's work leaves almost no paper. A candidate learns it by hearing it, and the next candidate learns it from him. Whatever Oloff taught was not written down in any newspaper, and it survived the way such things do, in the way later members did the work.
Notice in the Times
On March 15, 1903, the New York Times ran a two-line notice: Oloff died at Astoria on March 8, in the 74th year of his age. A week later, on March 22, the Brooklyn Citizen's roundup of Queens surrogate's decrees listed a will case in his name among the week's business at Jamaica. (5, 6)
His own remembered legacy is the part the notices leave out. Nothing in them says he was a Mason, or a teacher, or that a lodge in Astoria still told stories about how he had run the work.
The Part That Doesn't Print
A charter roll gives a name and a position, and an election notice gives an office. Neither can record that a candidate in the 1870s or 1880s heard the lodge's ritual as Oloff taught it, and that the men who learned it from him taught it to others. A lodge is mostly a body of practice passed along by people, and Advance Lodge began with a Swedish shipwright who already knew how its work was supposed to sound. What came after rested, in part, on what he taught.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635, F. & A.M., membership records for John E. Oloff: aged 39, native of Sweden, ship carpenter; raised May 23, 1856, in Silentia Lodge No. 198; affiliated with Polar Star Lodge No. 245, New York City, January 13, 1858. Return to text
- Advance Lodge No. 635, F. & A.M., biographical account of John E. Oloff as a charter member, Master, Treasurer, and ritualist. Return to text
- Advance Lodge No. 635, F. & A.M. (Astoria): charter member roll and list of masters, as printed in Munsell's history of Long Island City, Queens. Dispensation 1866; charter 1867. Return to text
Newspapers
- The Brooklyn Union, December 28, 1876, p. 4: “Masonic Elections,” Advance Lodge, of Astoria. Return to text
- The New York Times, March 15, 1903, p. 18: death notice of John E. Oloff. Return to text
- The Brooklyn Citizen, March 22, 1903, p. 4: “Surrogate's Decrees.” Return to text
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