The State of the Lodge

Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, Autumn 2026

Mystic Tie began 2017 with 237 Master Masons. It began 2026 with 163, and 154 are on the rolls today. The one rise in that stretch came at the start of 2020, after the 2019 consolidation with Century Lodge.

Master Masons at the start of each year, 2017–2026. Grand Lodge Recapitulation Statements.

We are not alone. From 2018 through 2023, the years for which state and national counts are available, Mystic Tie kept 84.7 percent of its members, Indiana 85.2 percent, and Masonry across the United States 83.1 percent. Our curve has run alongside the state’s and the nation’s.

Membership as a percent of each body’s 2018 count, 2018–2023.

Membership counts and percent of 2018 level, 2018–2023.

The membership is aging, not just shrinking. The mean age of our living members rose from 62.6 in January 2017 to 67.9 today. A roster with no one joining and no one leaving would age exactly one year per year. Ours aged about 0.57 years per year, so new members and losses together offset less than half of the clock.

Mean age of living membership, 2017–2026. Lodge membership records.

Non-payment of dues now rivals death as a cause of loss. From 2017 through 2025 the lodge recorded 166 losses: 59 deaths, 58 suspensions for non-payment of dues, 47 demits, and 2 suspensions for other cause. There were no expulsions. Death still leads, by one. The difference matters, because no lodge can change mortality. Dues collection, engagement, and keeping members are within our reach.

Attrition by cause, 2017–2025 (166 total). Grand Lodge Recapitulation Statements.

Recruitment alone will not restore the roster. Applying the 2023 Social Security actuarial mortality tables to the ages of today’s 154 members, along with the lodge’s own 2017–2025 rates of demits (2.47 percent a year) and non-payment suspensions (2.97 percent a year), projects about 54 members in 2036 if no one is raised, 90 at five a year, and 127 at ten a year. Ten a year is above any year in the 2017–2025 record. Holding at today’s level would take an average of about 13 new Master Masons a year.

Projected membership to 2036 at 0, 5, and 10 new Master Masons raised per year.

The fuller history of Mystic Tie’s membership will follow in the Winter edition.

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Listen, My Brethren, and You Shall Hear

By Glenn A. Blackwood, PM, Secretary

Just after midnight one Wednesday, my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. I let it go, and a few minutes later it rang again. The area code was Georgia. I have no family there, and no member of Mystic Tie lives there. A wrong number, I decided. I fell back to sleep and didn’t give it another thought until that afternoon, when the same number appeared again.

I was busy and let it go to voicemail. But when I listened to the message, the first word I heard was “Brother.” Naturally, I returned the call.

He was Brother Andrew Burney of Guyton Lodge No. 428, in Guyton, Georgia. Each month he gives a lecture on a famous Mason, and he was preparing one on General Mark Clark, who he believed had been a member of our lodge. His reasoning was simple. Nearly everyone knows George Washington was a Mason. So he had set out to speak about famous men whom most people don’t realize were Masons.

He had a personal connection to General Clark: his father served under him. What he remembered most was that Clark addressed him as “sir,” even as a boy. Clark believed that if you treat a boy as a man, he will behave as a gentleman.

Our conversation set me thinking about a third kind of Mason. Not the famous man everyone knows was a brother, nor the famous man few know was a brother, but a brother whose story I had never heard until recently.

Let me tell you about one.

He was born in New England, the son of a noted housewright.

A Freemason. A Master of his lodge. A patriot who carried word on horseback that the British were coming.

Illustration by Lisa Cordner.

His name was Wentworth Cheswill.

Worshipful Brother Wentworth Cheswill

Portrait of Wentworth Cheswill by RW∴ Ryan J. Flynn, commissioned by the Grand Lodge of New Hampshire, unveiled July 10, 2026, New Hampshire State House.

Worshipful Brother Wentworth Cheswill (1746–1817) was born in Newmarket, New Hampshire, the grandson of an enslaved man of African ancestry. In 1768, at twenty-two, he was elected town constable. The New Market Historical Society calls him “widely acknowledged as the first person of African descent elected to public office in the United States.” Newmarket went on to choose him for public office every year of his life but one.

In December 1774 he carried messages on horseback between Newmarket and Exeter. In 1777 he marched to Saratoga as a private in Langdon’s Company of Light Horse Volunteers. He helped found the Newmarket Social Library, corresponded with Jeremy Belknap, and is recognized as one of the nation’s earliest archaeologists. In the early 1800s he served as Master of Columbian Lodge No. 2 in Nottingham.

Three years after his death, Senator David Morril of New Hampshire held him up on the Senate floor as an educated, respected citizen and patriot who would nonetheless have been barred from Missouri because of his ancestry.

In July 2026 the Grand Lodge of New Hampshire unveiled his portrait in the State House, painted by Right Worshipful Brother Ryan J. Flynn. Newmarket plans a bronze of him, seated and reading, for the town’s 300th anniversary in 2027.

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Blue Plate, Blue Lodge

Three Generations at Mystic Tie

In 1888, William Jonathon Wesley opened the Boston Confectionery at 4 Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. By about 1900 it had become a dairy lunch, one of the first cafeteria-style services in the Midwest. In the 1920s his son and daughter-in-law, Claude and Flora, opened the Central Cafeteria, and in the 1930s the family ran concession stands at the Indiana State Fair, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Riverside Amusement Park.

Claude and Flora’s son, Charles, was born in Indianapolis on March 5, 1927, and left high school early to work in the family business. On September 29, 1953, he was raised a Master Mason in Mystic Tie Lodge. He went on to become a 32° Scottish Rite Mason.

In 1957 Charles and his brothers, among them Lloyd, formed a family corporation. Charles shaped the look of its restaurants himself. After seeing Win Schuler’s restaurant in Marshall, Michigan, in the late 1950s, he oversaw a freestanding cafeteria at Southern Plaza, which opened in 1964 and set the chain’s Tudor style for the next twenty-five years. His standards reached down to the appearance of a slice of sugar-cream pie. When The New Yorker profiled the chain in 1988, it noted that he wore a Scottish Rite ring set with a diamond, a gift from a family member.

At its height the chain ran about ten locations around Indianapolis, plus restaurants in Kokomo and Terre Haute. Outside the restaurants, Charles led a seven-figure restoration of First Lutheran Church, donated the land for Community Hospital on Washington Street, and was named a Sagamore of the Wabash.

His son, Chip, was raised in Mystic Tie on October 26, 1981. In 1998 Chip opened Loon Lake Lodge in Castleton, an Adirondack-themed restaurant with a floatplane mounted on its roof. His own son remembers what kind of man he was: “I don’t know how many times that I saw him feed someone for free because they couldn’t afford to pay for it.”

That son, Chad, was raised in Mystic Tie on November 26, 2007.

Three generations, raised in the same lodge in 1953, 1981, and 2007. For more than a century, their family name hung over restaurant doors across Indianapolis.

They were the Laughners.

Brother Charles Frank Laughner (1927–2020)

The dairy lunch was Laughner’s Dairy Lunch, and the chain was Laughner’s Cafeterias. The name reached further than the family’s own signs: the “L” in MCL Cafeterias, founded in 1950 by Charles O. McGaughey and George Laughner, stands for Laughner. Chad still remembers his grandfather’s explanation for the family’s calling: “My grandpa used to say we were born with grease in our veins.”

Laughners Dairy Lunch and Restaurant. Bass Photo Co. Collection, Indiana Historical Society (Bass #280266-F).

Laughner Cafeteria postcard: the sign, the Tudor dining room, and the building at night.

The cafeterias wound down beginning in 2000, and the last restaurants carrying the Laughner name closed in 2001. When Loon Lake Lodge closed in August 2010, it ended 122 years of the family in the Indianapolis restaurant business. Chip died in April 2020. His father died on November 18 of the same year, at home in Indianapolis, at 93.

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