Auburn Masonic Temple

Sal is a voice that rides along as you drive Washington's roads: the road ahead, the pass, the stories of the places you pass.

Settlers around Auburn, then called Slaughter, met as early as 1886 to talk about starting a Masonic lodge of their own, and in May 1889 the Grand Lodge granted a dispensation before Washington was a state [1]. A charter followed on June 11, 1890, for King Solomon Lodge No. 60, with Henry A. Libby as Master [1]. The lodge met in rented halls through the 1890s and 1910s, and in October 1921 it appointed a committee to plan a temple of its own [1]. Aaron Neely and his wife Sarah gave a site on East Main free of debt [1]. Construction began by mid-September 1923, and the cornerstone ceremony drew Grand Master Tom Holman of Olympia and music by the Auburn Quartet [1]. The Masons occupied the building in the summer of 1924 [1]. Heath, Gove & Bell designed it in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, a mode late to arrive in the Pacific Northwest and used mostly for commercial and civic buildings [1]. In 2015 the temple joined the National Register of Historic Places [1].