The lodge was conceived in the autumn of 1931, in the depths of the Depression, when a company of Boston Masons led by Harry A. Friedland of Germania Lodge resolved to raise a new altar in the city and drew three seasoned Past Masters to the work: Joseph Brettler of Germania, T. Rutherford Edwards of Revere Lodge, and Harry Smith of Shawmut. It was Smith, a devoted student of the craft, who proposed the name, that the young body might perpetuate the memory of the merchant, patriot, and Grand Master who had presided over Massachusetts Masonry from 1788 to 1792. Fifty-two brethren signed the petition, which the three founders carried to Grand Master Herbert W. Dean on the first of December; the dispensation issued within the week, and on December 22, 1931, in the Masonic Temple at Boston, the District Deputy read the instrument and seated Edwards in the East with Brettler and Smith at the wardens’ stations. Nine months of labor under dispensation followed, the first candidates entered in March and raised by June, until the Grand Lodge granted the charter at its Quarterly Communication of September 14, 1932. On the evening of November 22, before two hundred and eighty brethren assembled in Ionic Hall, Grand Master Curtis Chipman and his suite constituted Moses Michael Hays Lodge in due and ancient form, installed its officers, and welcomed it into the fellowship with congratulations upon the name it had chosen to honor.
The young lodge took its character from its first Master: Edwards had received his degrees in Liverpool, and on his recommendation the body followed the English plan, a deliberately small membership, classes limited to three candidates, and a fellowship close enough that absent brethren sent word to the East and were toasted at dinner. Brettler, reverently remembered as the Father of the Lodge, assumed the chair in December 1933, and Smith followed two years later, bringing to the office a historian’s devotion to the namesake. On a visit to New York, Smith met Lelia A. and Adelia P. Myers, great-great-great granddaughters of Moses Michael Hays, and persuaded them to entrust to the lodge the very jewels and apron their ancestor had worn as Grand Master. At the fifth anniversary celebration in the Grand Ballroom of the Copley Plaza on January 7, 1937, the lodge presented those relics to Grand Master Claude L. Allen for permanent display in the Grand Lodge museum, where thousands have since viewed them. That same year Smith, writing with J. Hugo Tatsch, the Grand Lodge Librarian, published Moses Michael Hays: Merchant, Citizen, Freemason, placing copies with the Grand Lodges of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York and with the Boston Public Library. Devotion extended to the grave itself: Smith laid a wreath at Newport in August 1936, and on May 9, 1939, the two hundredth anniversary of Hays’s birth, the lodge made a pilgrimage to his resting place.
War tested the foundation the founders had laid. Howard S. Gutlon was installed in the East on December 4, 1941, three days before Pearl Harbor, though the lodge had already voted, a full year earlier, that any member entering the armed forces would be exempt from dues for the duration. An honor roll soon carried twenty-seven members and twenty-eight sons and daughters of members in the nation’s service, sustained by a War Emergency Fund that shipped parcels overseas, while the brethren’s per capita gift to the Masonic Military Service Fund stood second in the entire jurisdiction. Amid the anxieties of 1942 the lodge still marked its tenth anniversary at the Copley Plaza, pausing mid-celebration to hear President Roosevelt address the nation by radio. Honors followed the sacrifice: Henry W. Stevens, the lodge’s longtime Marshal, was elected Senior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge in 1942, and Ralph J. Cohen was appointed District Deputy Grand Master for the Boston Second District in 1950. The postwar years brought candidates in such numbers that officers often worked two degrees in an evening, one-year terms in the East began with Samuel Winetsky in 1951, and by the silver anniversary of 1957 the rolls held 490 members, all within the Grand Lodge’s own Temple, the lodge’s Boston home from its birth.
In 1973 the lodge began planning a departure, and the following year, during the administration of Donald L. Hoffman, it removed to the Masonic building on Highland Avenue in Needham, a parting from the Temple that many felt keenly even as the new quarters kindled fresh activity. At Needham the lodge became the gathering place for a remarkable succession of Masonic Boston’s older houses. Putnam Lodge of Cambridge united with it first, on June 27, 1978, Grand Master Arthur H. Melanson presiding in person. Temple Lodge followed in 1985 and Brotherhood in 1986, both under Grand Master David B. Richardson, with Sharon Lodge joining in 1989 under Grand Master Albert T. Ames. Freedom Lodge entered in 1999 and Adelphi-Noddle’s Island in 2003, the latter itself carrying the previously joined lines of Adelphi and Noddle’s Island lodges. Beth-Horon of Brookline, which had received Nehoiden Lodge of Needham in 2010, completed the sequence on June 12, 2019, and brought with it a gift older than the lodge itself.
That gift was precedence: Beth-Horon had been born of parlor meetings in Brookline and held a dispensation dated November 15, 1870, the eldest instrument in the family, and by its union the lodge assumed that date as its own, the very year the seal now bears as Anno Lucis 5870. The elder line knew the present hall intimately, for Beth-Horon had kept the Newtonville Masonic apartments from 1982 until its Needham consolidation of 2010. Garden City Lodge, longtime keeper of that great hall of 1896 at the corner of Walnut Street and Newtonville Avenue, became the final chapter: the pandemic years drew it and Moses Michael Hays into a working partnership of shared officers and combined degrees, and conversation between the two Masters ripened, across four years of deliberation, into agreement. The surviving lodge would keep the Hays name and remove from Needham to Newtonville, meeting on the night Garden City had long observed. By the Grand Master’s dispensation the two bodies met as one under that roof from October 2024, and on January 25, 2025, Grand Master George F. Hamilton formally united them and installed the officers of the continuing lodge. So the story closes where the hall stands: at 460 Newtonville Avenue, on the second Thursday of the month, a lodge chartered in 1932, bearing a precedence of 1870, at home in a house of 1896 that two of its own ancestors kept before it.