Odd Fellows, Foresters and the Long 19th-Century Lodge Boom

Between roughly 1810 and 1920, an extraordinary proliferation of fraternal orders transformed the social and economic life of the English-speaking world. At the peak of the lodge boom, more than ten million American men belonged to one or more fraternal bodies, and Britain contained a parallel world of friendly societies serving a comparable fraction of the working class. This page surveys the major non-Masonic orders of the period and explains how they operated, what they did for their members, and why most of them declined through the twentieth century. For a more general account of the fraternal tradition, see the fraternal orders and lodges overview.

The Odd Fellows

English Roots

The phrase “odd fellow” was a generic term, in use from the seventeenth century, for a journeyman craftsman who did not belong to a regular trade guild. Such men met in taverns for fellowship, drinking, and mutual aid. By the late eighteenth century, a number of these informal societies had formalized themselves as “Odd Fellows’ societies” with regular meeting nights, subscription rates, and sick-pay and burial benefits. The Manchester Unity of Odd Fellows, established in 1810, was the dominant English body and the model for several later American offshoots.

The American Order

The American Independent Order of Odd Fellows was founded in Baltimore in 1819 by Thomas Wildey, an English Odd Fellow who had emigrated to the United States. The order grew rapidly through the 1830s, especially after 1842 when it opened its ritual and lodges to Black Americans in jurisdictions where this was possible—a notable step for an American fraternal body. By 1890 the IOOF had perhaps 870,000 members in the United States and Canada, making it the largest fraternal order in the English-speaking world after the Freemasons.

The IOOF ritual dramatized a series of moral and biblical lessons, drawing on the Old Testament for many of its dramatic motifs, and used a three-link chain of Friendship, Love, and Truth as its central emblem. The order’s motto, “Visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan,” captured the mutual-aid purpose of the body. The IOOF pioneered several practices that became standard in American fraternalism, including the establishment of juvenile lodges (the “Odd Fellows’ Cadets”) and the integration of women’s auxiliaries. The Rebekah degree, formally established by the IOOF in 1851, opened full fraternal life to women under the Rebekah symbol of the biblical matriarch.

The IOOF in the Twentieth Century

The IOOF peaked in the early twentieth century and then entered the long, slow decline that has affected the entire fraternal movement. Like most fraternal insurance bodies, the IOOF’s mutual insurance program became uneconomic in the era of state and employer-sponsored welfare. The order still exists in the United States, with substantial charitable and educational programs, and lodges remain active across the country. The 1842 decision to charter Black and mixed lodges, and the subsequent long relationship with Black American fraternalism, remains a distinctive feature of the order’s history.

The Ancient Order of Foresters

The Ancient Order of Foresters was a British friendly society that combined the recreational, ceremonial, and mutual-aid elements of the fraternal tradition. The order traced its modern formalization to 1834, when several local Foresters’ societies merged into a national body. Like the Manchester Unity of Odd Fellows, the Foresters collected weekly contributions from members and paid out benefits for sickness, accident, and burial. The order’s symbolism was drawn from the forest—its ceremonial vocabulary included the “Forester’s motto,” the “Forester’s call,” and a range of woodland imagery.

The Foresters’ Victorian high-water mark came in the late nineteenth century, when the order claimed more than half a million members across the United Kingdom and a substantial diaspora in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The Foresters’ Court—the equivalent of a lodge—was a familiar social institution in working-class districts, and the order’s banners and regalia were prominent features of the Foresters’ Day parades that marked the public life of many British towns.

The Foresters transformed themselves in the early twentieth century, demutualizing in part, becoming a more conventional mutual insurer, and eventually rebranding itself as Foresters Financial, a modern life-insurance and financial-services company with a continuing fraternal and charitable function. The transition is characteristic of the larger story of British friendly societies, which were gradually nationalized through the National Insurance Act of 1911 and then absorbed by the post-1948 welfare state.

The Knights of Pythias

The Knights of Pythias was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1864 by Justus H. Rathbone, who wrote the order’s ritual around the legend of the Greek philosophers Damon and Pythias—Pythias, condemned to death by the tyrant Dionysius, was reprieved at the last moment when his friend Damon offered to die in his place. The legend of fraternal friendship, taken from the Moralia of Plutarch, gave the order an unusually clean moral message: a Knight of Pythias was pledged to friendship, charity, and benevolence. The Pythias ritual was elaborate, with several degrees beyond the initial three, and the order’s “castle” was the equivalent of a Masonic lodge. Black and white Pythian lodges coexisted from an early period, particularly in the Reconstruction-era South.

The order’s peak membership, in the 1870s and 1880s, was about half a million. Like the IOOF and the Foresters, the Knights of Pythias entered a long decline in the twentieth century. The uniformed “rank” of the order—Knights in helmets and capes, drilling like a military body—became increasingly eccentric as the fraternal movement shifted to more conversational and charitable forms, and the order’s membership is now small relative to its nineteenth-century peak.

The Woodmen of the World and the Fraternal Insurance Model

Modern Woodmen of America

The Modern Woodmen of America was founded in 1883 by Joseph Cullen Root, a Lyon County, Iowa, insurance clerk, with a frontier-evoking ritual in which the lodge was a “neighborhood” and the members cleared a common wood and built a common camp. The Woodmen’s “woodcraft” symbolism drew on the image of the pioneer community, and the order’s insurance program was the practical business of the lodge. The Modern Woodmen remain a substantial fraternal insurance body.

Woodmen of the World

The Woodmen of the World, founded in 1890 in Omaha, Nebraska, by Joseph Cullen Root, was a sister organization of the Modern Woodmen of America. The “WOW” of the order is best known for the distinctive “tree monuments” that mark the graves of its members in cemeteries across the American South and Midwest. The carved tree-stone grave markers, in their several forms—the “tree stump” marker for a member, the “broken tree” for a child, the “fallen tree” for a member in good standing, the “broken limb” for a juvenile member, and the “dove” variant—are a striking and unusual feature of American funerary art and a tangible reminder of the fraternal movement’s deep reach into late-nineteenth-century American life.

The Woodmen of the World, like other fraternal-insurance bodies, struggled in the twentieth century against commercial insurers. The order demutualized in 2001, reorganized as a fraternal benefit society, and continues as a smaller body than at its peak.

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was founded in 1868 in New York City by a group of English-born actors and entertainers as a social club, the “Jolly Corks,” before being formally constituted as the B.P.O.E. in 1868. The Elks are the most architecturally impressive of the fraternal orders, with a national network of large, often Moorish-Revival or Classical-Revival lodge buildings on the main streets of American cities. The Elks’ charitable work, much of it focused on the treatment of children with disabilities, has been a defining feature of the order’s twentieth-century identity.

The Elks’ peak membership, around 1950, was roughly a million and a half. The order has declined in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but it remains a recognizable presence in American civic life and a useful point of reference for the fraternal tradition as it transitions to a more charitable-and-recreational form.

The Loyal Order of Moose

The Loyal Order of Moose was founded in 1888 in Louisville, Kentucky, by Dr. John Henry Wilson, in the context of a wave of working-class fraternal orders. The Moose lodge was organized as a mutual-aid body with sick benefits, death benefits, and a ritual drawn from a “Mooseheart” mythology. The order’s fraternal projects are best known through Mooseheart, a child-care community in Illinois founded in 1913, and Moosehaven, a retirement community in Florida founded in 1922, both of which remain active. The Moose’s recreational lodge life, the “Lodge” and “Chapter” structure of the order, and the prominent “Heart of the Moose” social program remain a recognizable part of American fraternalism.

The Knights of Columbus

The Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, by Father Michael J. McGivney, a young Catholic priest concerned with the welfare of working Catholic men. The order combined a fraternal insurance program with a religious and patriotic purpose. The Knights’ insurance program, the Knights of Columbus Insurance, remains an important mutual benefit society; the order’s charitable work includes the Support Our Troops program, the Ultrasound Initiative, the Father McGivney fund, and a substantial scholarship program.

The Knights of Columbus are the most prominent American fraternal order of the early twenty-first century. Membership has grown steadily since 1980, and the order is now one of the largest fraternal bodies in the world. The K of C’s consistent Catholic identity, its disciplined charitable program, and the fraternal insurance function have made it a model for the fraternal body’s transition into the contemporary period. The order’s headquarters at 1 Columbus Plaza in New Haven is a notable feature of the city’s architectural landscape.

Other Significant Orders of the Period

A number of smaller but historically important orders belong to the same period. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, founded in 1838 in New York, was the principal fraternal order of Irish Catholic men in the United States, with strong ties to the Catholic Church and the cause of Irish independence. The B.P.O. Elks, the Loyal Order of Moose, and the Knights of Columbus together form the trio of large fraternal bodies serving Catholic and working-class communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Patriotic Order of the Sons of America, the Order of the Sons of Italy, the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, the Royal Order of the Moose, the Fraternal Order of Orioles, the Order of Owls, the Tribe of Ben Hur, and the Royal Neighbors of America are among the many small and sometimes short-lived orders that proliferated in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. The major orders, listed above, account for the bulk of fraternal membership in the period. Many of these smaller orders developed elaborate ritual systems drawing on the symbols, ritual, and initiation vocabulary of the broader fraternal tradition.

The Decline of the Lodge Boom

The fraternal order entered the twentieth century at its peak and left it much diminished. The IOOF, the Knights of Pythias, the Elks, the Moose, the Woodmen, and the Foresters all lost between two-thirds and nine-tenths of their membership between 1920 and 1980. The causes include the rise of mass media and mass leisure, the secularization of American life, the suburbanization of residential patterns, the demographic aging of the existing membership, the failure to recruit younger members, the takeover of the mutual-aid function by the welfare state, and the consolidation of the insurance industry into large commercial carriers.

The orders that have survived most successfully have generally done so by combining a strong fraternal-and-religious identity with a continuing insurance or charitable program. The Knights of Columbus, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Catholic Order of Foresters, the Knights of St. Columba, and the Sons of St. George are examples of this model in various Christian communities. The Masonic Fraternity has survived through a more recreational, social, and charitable identity. The Ancient Order of Foresters has transitioned into a modern mutual insurer. The IOOF remains a small but active fraternal order in the United States. The broader story of the fraternal decline is examined in the fraternal orders and lodges pillar, and the consequences for American civic life are surveyed in the history of secret societies entry.

The Fraternal Order and the Modern American Civic Order

The fraternal order, even in diminished form, has had a significant influence on the broader American civic order. Many of the conventions of American voluntary association—regular meetings, open election of officers, written bylaws, the secret ballot, the fraternal dues structure, the lodge’s ritualized celebration of civic life—come from the fraternal orders. American small-town civic life, in particular, was often built around a network of lodges, and the lodges provided a formative training ground for the political and economic leaders of the early twentieth century. The fraternal orders also provided a familiar institutional space for the immigrant communities of the period: the German-American and Irish-American lodges of the late nineteenth century were an important way station in the immigrant incorporation process. The fraternal-insurance body, in particular, was a model that has been imitated by every major American mutual insurer of the twentieth century, and the fraternal tradition has left a deep imprint on the modern American insurance and charitable sector.

For the broader history of the fraternal order, including the Freemason template and the chivalric orders descended from the medieval Knights Templar, see the fraternal orders and lodges pillar. The modern college secret societies are an offshoot of the same fraternal tradition, and the Bohemian Grove is a private club in the fraternal style.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly works are Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989); Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (1989); and Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995), for the period of fraternal peak. For the Odd Fellows specifically, John K. Benson, The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Its Insurance Activities (1953, historical pamphlet). For the Foresters and the British friendly-society tradition, Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 (2003), and for the American fraternal-insurance system, the older but still useful Robert B. Abney, Fraternal Insurance in the United States (1934). For the Knights of Columbus, Christopher J. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism (1982). For the Elks, Charles T. Gatke, A Compilation of the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (1926).

The fraternal orders and lodges pillar, Freemasonry explained, Knights Templar, college secret societies, history of secret societies, and symbols, rituals and initiation treat the surrounding context. The Bohemian Grove explained treats the modern private-club continuation.