CLICK HERE TO READ Michael Robinson_Lemuel Lyon Bio
MWB, RWB, WB Brethren and Brethren All,
In this difficult time, as I work to recovery from recent surgery, I thought that I would share this article for the edification of the Craft and your entertainment.
Introduction:
I sometimes find it strange where I end up while researching Oregon Masonic History, and if my special talent for inadvertently making my projects as complicated as I can might require medical intervention. At the last Grand Lodge session there was a vote on an expanded Masonic News. I don’t believe the brethren understood the benefits this might bring and it was voted down. In hopes that those benefits might be illustrated there was talk of a sample version being published this spring. Be that as it may, I began looking into what I might be able to offer to this project. My attention to detail, or perhaps obsessive desire to find the whole story, makes it impossible to offer the kinds of articles I would like to submit in our current system, and my apparent long winded approach would make even the expanded version a challenge. While copying volumes of the old Oregon Masonic Analyst I found an article in 1923 which talked about the origin of our ritual and cipher. It was a reasonable size and I thought that would be great. However, I decided that I would look back into the Proceedings for more prospective. From the stand point of brevity that was probably a mistake. I quickly noted that the short article failed to capture the complexity of the situation and was not quite accurate; it gave some interesting perspective for the immediate decade and then a bunch of statistics of minor interest. It no longer seemed a good choice. The project had now gone off the rails. As I gathered more and more data on the Uniform Work in Oregon it quickly became apparent that this was not an article but a book; which I am working to have finished by the Grand Lodge Session in June. Having by that time extracted 30 pages of information from the proceedings and that rapidly increasing, I stumbled upon an article in the appendix of the History of Oregon Masonry by John Wilkinson (the first Grand Lodge Historian 1951-1975) concerning the Uniform Work. At first I thought maybe I had wasted my time and the story was already done, but upon further examination I had found many things he had missed, and he had found a few things I had missed. So I ventured on. I have spent a lot of time over the years building a digital archive of pictures. Ever one to complicate the issue, I decided to add pictures where I could of the men involved. After the mention of Lemuel Lyon appeared a few times, I set out to complicate the issue further by putting together bios of the main players in this story. Lemuel Lyon was the first and so far most extensive. Very little was written about him, a few paragraphs in the Lyon Lodge History, some mentions in the Proceedings. But the further I looked the more interesting his story became, and so the harder I dove in. Tracking his genealogy I was able to find resources online from the Grand Lodges of Massachusetts, California, Oregon and Japan. With the sponsorship of the Eugene Valley Scottish Rite, I had gotten a subscription to Newspapers.com where I could find original articles from the 1850-60s. With that, details gleaned from Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com began to unearth a rich story of a fascinating man and Mason. So I now present the Story of Capt. Lemuel Lyon. And yes I am aware that my introduction would already be considered a long article even for the expanded newsletter.
Sincerely and Fraternally,
WB Michael D. Robinson, 32°, K.C.C.H.
Orient of Oregon Historian, A&A Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Grand Historian of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Oregon
March 16, 2020
Greetings Brethren,
