From the East
Greetings from the East
A Message from the Worshipful Master
Worshipful Master Brandon Armacost, P.M.
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398
Brethren, as I embark on the half way point of my second stent in the Oriental Chair, I can’t help but to feel both privileged and disquieted.
As a lodge we will have the honor in just a short couple of years to usher in a Brother to the Grand East, our very own Worshipful Brother Jerry B. Maple, the current Junior Grand Warden for The Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the State of Indiana—and I have some thoughts to share on where our lodge stands, and where we go from here.
Read the full message from the East →
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Feature · Vol. I · Summer 2026
Washington:
A Mason
Reprised on the 250th Anniversary of the Nation He Founded
Originally delivered by W∴ John Caven
First Worshipful Master, Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, F. & A.M.
Before the Lodge · Indianapolis, Indiana · December 14, 1899
Being the Centennial of the Death of Washington
A Note from the Editor
On December 14, 1899 — the centennial of Washington's death — Worshipful Brother John Caven, the first man ever to sit in the East of Mystic Tie Lodge, delivered this address to our brethren. He could not have foreseen that his words would be read again in 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the nation Washington founded. We present them here, lightly edited for length, as our Lodge's own contribution to America's semiquincentennial — in the voice of the man who built this Lodge, speaking of the man who built this country.
Washington: A Mason
John Caven · Press of Wm. B. Burford, Indianapolis, 1900
Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Washington was a Mason. And it is fortunate he was; for upon this fact depended important consequences: the success of the American Revolution, the union of the States, and the formation of our government. He became a Mason in his twenty-first year, and thus early, imbued with Masonic principles — which had much to do in forming his character and making him that which he became, the Father of His Country, the founder of a nation and the Colossus of all time.
Washington and Masonry — a grand combination. Washington belonged to the world, and Masonry is a world institution. It had much to do in making history, and its influence on other world institutions — progress, civilization, liberty and religion — was great.
"Strike from the history of our revolutionary period this mighty chain of events — strike a single mighty link from this mighty chain — and our liberties would not have been won."
— W∴ John Caven, Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, 1899
On the night of the thirteenth day of December, 1773, a great town meeting was held in the old South Church in Boston. The question was whether the tea aboard three British ships in the harbor should be permitted to be landed. Seven thousand souls debated far into the night, and unanimously decided it should not. When the decision was announced, Samuel Adams rose and gave the word. Without — a seeming band of some fifty Mohawk Indian warriors were waiting and listening; and answering to that word, a shout, a war-whoop went up, and that band of warriors marched single-file to Boston harbor, cast the tea into the ocean, and vanished in the darkness of the night, none knowing whence they came or whither they went.
That seeming band of Indian warriors was a band of patriot Masons. A Boston Masonic Lodge had met that night, but were called from labor to refreshment; Paul Revere, the Mason, afterward Grand Master of Massachusetts, superintending them during the hours thereof. So well was the secret kept that not until long after the war was ended was it known to any but the actors who it was that composed the famous Boston Tea Party.
On the night of the eighteenth day of April, 1775, Joseph Warren — that vigilant sentinel Mason on the outposts of liberty — rang the alarm bells of Boston, and Paul Revere, the Mason, rode in the darkness of midnight like a thunderbolt of war to Lexington, and called the minute men to arms. Before the dawn of that fateful nineteenth day of April, the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.
John Hancock, the Mason, was President of the Third Continental Congress, that of 1776; and that Congress — thank Heaven, nearly all Masons — adopted the Declaration of American Independence. Richard Henry Lee, a Mason from Virginia, introduced the declaration. It was referred to a committee composed mostly of Masons, among them Robert Livingston, Grand Master of New York, and Benjamin Franklin, Grand Master of Pennsylvania. And on the fourth day of July, 1776, that declaration was adopted.
Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of American Independence, fifty-two were Masons — the first and boldest signature that of John Hancock, the Mason President of that Congress. And that declaration was written upon a white lambskin — a Mason's apron. Some years ago I saw the original parchment on which that declaration was written, in the archives of our government at Washington, sacredly kept as were the Tables of Stone in the Ark of the Covenant at Horeb — the only signature yet legible being that of John Hancock, the Mason.
"Only a blank parchment, only a white lambskin — yet it was the charter of a nation's liberties. Only a blank parchment, only a white lambskin — yet the grandest page the muse of history has ever read or written, or ever will."
— W∴ John Caven, 1899
Many of the soldiers of the Revolution were Masons. A large number of its officers were Masons. And all of its great generals — fifteen in number — were Masons, five of them Grand Masters of Grand Lodges. Washington, the Commander-in-Chief from beginning to end, was a Mason, a charter member and Worshipful Master of a Virginia Lodge. And it was in the Army Lodge — the American Union Lodge in Washington's camp — that Washington, the Mason, Commander-in-Chief, surrounded by his trusted Mason generals and tiled by Mason guards, held his grand councils of war.
General Joseph Warren, who rang the alarm bells of Boston and died upon Bunker Hill, was a Mason and Grand Master of Massachusetts. General Steuben, who taught the American army the art of war he had learned under Frederick the Great, was a Mason. Lafayette, the bosom friend and companion of Washington, was a Mason. And General DeKalb, who fell at the battle of Camden pierced with eleven wounds, was a Mason.
Without Masons and Masonry, the tea would not have been thrown overboard at Boston. Without Masons and Masonry, the alarm bells of Boston would not have been rung. Without Masons and Masonry, the battle of Lexington would not have been fought. Without Masons and Masonry, Washington would not have been appointed Commander-in-Chief. Without Masons and Masonry, the Declaration of Independence would not have been declared. Without Masons and Masonry, the Constitution of the United States would not have been ordained.
Many members of the Constitutional Convention warmly favored adoption of the draft Constitution, while many others bitterly opposed it. These dissensions culminated in differences which seemed irreconcilable, and a resolution was introduced to adjourn without day — when Benjamin Franklin, a member and a Mason, over eighty years of age, introduced a substitute: that instead of adjourning without day, each morning before commencing their deliberations, a prayer be offered asking wisdom and guidance from on high.
The resolution was adopted. The first prayer was offered. A holy hush and calm from above came down upon them, and thenceforward the discussions were conducted with temperate zeal, with mutual concession and courtesy — and resulted in the adoption of that glorious Constitution under which we are living to-day.
When Washington took the first oath as President of the United States, the oath was administered by Robert Livingston, the Grand Master of New York, on the Altar Bible of St. John's Lodge No. 1. When the cornerstone of the Capitol was laid at Washington, the stone was laid by Masons, and Washington was present as President and also as a Mason, clothed in Masonic regalia. Washington the Great, Washington the greatest of mortals, Washington the immortal, lived and died a Mason — and Masons bore his sacred dust to the tomb and laid upon his coffin the Acacia, symbol of immortality.
"And it will be perpetual, for its great triune principles of faith, hope and charity are perpetual. Faith can not die, Hope is ever young, and Charity is immortal."
— W∴ John Caven, Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, 1899
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W∴ Caven closed his address to the Lodge with a poem of his own composition. We close with it here, as he closed then — with the same light he asked his brethren to seek, and which this Lodge has sought for one hundred and twenty-seven years since.
John Caven
First Worshipful Master, Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, F. & A.M.
Let There Be Light
By W∴ J. Caven, K.T., 33°
"Let there be Light," Jehovah said.
Creation's vaulted dome resplendent shone,
Old Chaos all affrighted fled
From off his dark and gloomy throne.
The waters rolled away, the earth was born,
And smiling, glowed beneath creation's morn.
When comes the Horse and Rider pale,
And Death's hoodwink shall close the Mason's sight,
When past the dark and shadowy vale,
All shall be brought to further light
Within that Lodge that's builded on the sky,
And lighted by our God's all-seeing eye.
'Tis lighted by our Master's smile of love.
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398 · Free & Accepted Masons · Indianapolis, Indiana
Source: "Washington: A Mason" — Address by W∴ John Caven, First Worshipful Master,
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, F. & A.M. Indianapolis: Press of Wm. B. Burford, 1900.
Digitized by the Internet Archive. Huntington Library, San Marino, California (lib-79006).
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Feature · Vol. I · Summer 2026
To God, Your Neighbor,
and Yourself
Three Brothers of Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398, and the Charge They Kept
Rev. Willis D. Engle
Raised June 14, 1869
On the evening of June 14, 1869, a twenty-two-year-old Episcopal clergyman knelt at the altar of a lodge that had existed for less than a year. When he rose as a Master Mason, Worshipful Brother Willis Darwin Engle became the first man raised to the Sublime Degree under the charter of Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398.
Over the half century that followed, W∴ Engle served as the lodge's secretary, attended 1,339 of its first 1,424 stated meetings, and wrote 1,926 pages of minutes by hand. He served twice as Worshipful Master, was appointed Grand Lecturer and Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Indiana, and became the foremost authority on Masonic law in the state. He authored the history of the Order of the Eastern Star in Indiana. He built Episcopal congregations in seven Indiana cities. He kept the record of this lodge with a fidelity those who followed him would describe as without parallel.
He did not describe it that way himself. When the lodge gathered in 1905 to honor his thirty-sixth year as secretary, and invited him to address the brethren on those years, he confined his remarks to his two terms as Worshipful Master and his service as Grand Lecturer and Grand Chaplain. The man who had written down everything about everyone else had almost nothing to say about himself.
Worshipful Brother Arthur R. Baxter said it for him, in an address before the lodge in December 1914:
"The first candidate raised by the Lodge, after receipt of its charter, was our own beloved Willis D. Engle, then but 28 years old in 1869, and destined to be the youngest Worshipful Master ever elected in Mystic Tie Lodge. How very appropriate that the first official act of the Lodge under its charter should be the raising of this brother who is acknowledged by all as probably the most valuable member of the Lodge in the period of 1869 to 1914. He is a man of high character, a brotherly and fraternal spirit, and of the willingness and disposition always to be helpful in every possible way."
(W∴ Baxter's arithmetic ran a few years ahead of itself — Brother Engle, born in October 1846, was twenty-two in 1869, not twenty-eight. The esteem in the room that night was correct regardless.)
At the lodge's fourth anniversary, in 1873, W∴ Engle had described the purpose that animated the lodge's founders:
"We owe our origin as a Lodge to a few young and progressive men who... thought by combining a unity of action with their unity of purpose, to make more manifest the benefits of our Institution by more earnest if not better work."
That platform held for five decades. W∴ Engle himself was its living proof.
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John Hampden Holliday
Raised 1871 · 33°
Where W∴ Engle preserved the life of the lodge in ink, another brother raised in this room would carry its principles into the life of the city itself.
Two years after W∴ Engle's raising, Brother John Hampden Holliday was raised in the same lodge. He was twenty-four. A year earlier, at twenty-three, he had founded the Indianapolis News — the first two-cent evening paper west of Pittsburgh, an independent voice in a city then served by the partisan Indianapolis Journal and Indianapolis Sentinel. He had served in the 137th Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. Afterward he read for the law, apprenticed at three Indianapolis papers, and corresponded for the New York Herald, the New York Journal, the Chicago Republican, and the Cincinnati Gazette. During the twenty-three years that followed, sixteen competing evening papers rose and fell around the News. His survived.
After selling the paper, Brother Holliday organized the Union Trust Company, served as president of the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society for more than twenty years, co-founded the Indianapolis Foundation — one of the first community foundations in the United States, with Union Trust as one of its three original pillars — co-founded the Society of Indiana Pioneers and served as its first president, served as a trustee of Crown Hill Cemetery, and gave the city eighty acres of land on the west bank of the White River, which became Holliday Park.
In 1917, as America entered the First World War, he addressed his Masonic brethren. He had then been a Scottish Rite Mason for forty-six years. His words that evening were published in The Indiana Freemason:
"Masonry is a spiritual system whose teaching is veiled in the symbolism of material objects, in the study of which men may go from lower to higher things in the development of their characters and their relations to their fellow men. Many Masons do not take an intelligent, comprehensive view of the principles of our order. They find pleasure in its companionship and social relations, but they do not get down to the heart of its teachings and translate them into life."
On what he called the new spirit of Masonry:
"This is the spirit of service, the conviction that we should be helpful and self-sacrificing, for in that direction lies peace and happiness. There is more feeling that men are brothers and that they must live as brothers, casting out indifference and selfishness."
He held the same conviction as a private citizen: "I believe that a responsibility of his community rests upon every citizen. If he has prospered through the growth and business activity of the place, he ought to do something to make it better than he found it." And on the nature of what he and men like him held: "He who holds talents, or wealth, or power holds them not for selfish gratification but in trust for others, that he may promote their happiness and well being."
Holliday Park, the Indianapolis Foundation, the Union Trust Company — these were never monuments. They were that trust, discharged.
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Arthur R. Baxter
Raised 1903 · 33°
In 1903, W∴ Arthur Reyburn Baxter was raised in this lodge. He had left school at sixteen, risen to the presidency of the Keyless Lock Company, served in the Indiana State Senate, and became the first Life Governor of the Riley Memorial Association — now Riley Children's Foundation. He and his wife Frances Delight Doyle Baxter established the Baxter Foundation, which funded the Arthur R. Baxter YMCA, Baxter Hall at Wabash College, and the Frances D. Baxter Memorial Wing at Riley Hospital.
He served as Worshipful Master of Mystic Tie in 1912, was elevated to the 33° that year, served as Most Wise Master of the Indianapolis Chapter of Rose Croix from 1913 to 1915, and chaired the Building Committee for the construction of the Scottish Rite Cathedral.
On August 18, 1925, he and Frances offered the Valley of Indianapolis a 54-bell carillon from the world-famous Taylor Bell Foundry in England — at that time the largest carillon in the United States. The decision to give a carillon rather than chimes, which more than doubled the cost, was settled at the family dinner table. As reported in the Indianapolis News on July 9, 1927, by William Herschell, Frances turned to her husband and said:
"Father, I would rather have it that we be remembered for the bells than for having the most beautiful mausoleum in Crown Hill cemetery."
On May 5, 1929, more than fifty thousand people gathered to hear the premiere carillon concert, performed by Anton Brees, Bellmaster of the Bok Tower in Florida. The bells have rung from that tower every hour since.
One of the largest bears this inscription: Dedicated to the glory of the Grand Architect of the Universe. Another: Dedicated in fraternal esteem to Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398. Arthur R. Baxter, Past Master. A smaller bell carries this: To Frances D. Baxter, the wife of my youth, who abides with me still. Arthur R. Baxter, 1928.
A room in the Cathedral bears his name. Members of his family have belonged to this lodge across four generations.
To the Glory of the Grand Architect of the Universe
To God, Your Neighbor, and Yourself
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In 1905, addressing the lodge on the work of those who had come before him, W∴ Engle spoke of W∴ John Caven — founder of this lodge, several-times mayor of Indianapolis — as "in most respects the noblest Roman of them all." And in describing what the lodge asked of every brother, he returned to the language all of them knew by heart: the discharge of their duties to God, their neighbor, and themselves.
W∴ Engle kept that charge in a record book for nearly half a century. Brother Holliday kept it in a newspaper, a bank, a park, and a foundation that still shapes this city. W∴ Baxter kept it in steel, in philanthropy, and in fifty thousand pounds of bronze bells that ring over Indianapolis every hour of every day.
The charge endures.
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398 · Free & Accepted Masons · Indianapolis, Indiana
Sources: Century of Dedication, 1868–1968 (James B. Gale); The Indiana Freemason;
Indianapolis News archives; Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.
Portraits from Century of Dedication and period Masonic publications.
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398 · Free & Accepted Masons · Indianapolis, Indiana
Additional photographs, sources, and supplementary notes for this issue are gathered in a companion page:
Notes & Sources →
The Lion's Paw · Vol. I · Summer 2026
Mystic Tie Lodge No. 398 · Free & Accepted Masons · Indianapolis, Indiana
Published in commemoration of America's 250th Anniversary
