The Masonic Hall on Commercial Row: Reno's Oldest Building and the Box in the Cornerstone

On a Tuesday in October 1872, a procession formed in front of the Reno lodge rooms and marched up Virginia Street and down Commercial Row to a corner lot by the railroad tracks: the Red Men first, then the Odd Fellows, then the Master Masons, then the officers of the Grand Lodge of Nevada, with the Reno band playing. At the corner the Grand Master laid a cornerstone over a lead box, and the town went off to a collation at the Central Pacific freight depot and a ball that ran most of the night. The building that rose on that stone was a two-story brick hall, thirty-five feet wide and seventy-five deep, and it stood at the corner of Sierra Street and Commercial Row for the next 146 years. It outlived every other commercial building in Reno. When it finally came down, brick by brick, in the winter of 2018, the crew went looking for the box and could not find it.

This is the story of Masonic Lodge No. 13, the Reno Mercantile Company, and the oldest commercial building in a city that has never been sentimental about its old buildings. It is also the story of what was in the box, which turns out to be a better inventory of Reno in 1872 than anyone has managed since.

A Town Four Years Old

Reno was an auction before it was a town. The Central Pacific sold the first lots in May 1868, and the place grew the way railroad towns grew, in wood and canvas along the tracks. The Masons were there almost at once; Reno Lodge No. 13 received its charter from the Grand Lodge in Virginia City in 1869 and met wherever it could, first in a hall on the main street, then in rented rooms. By 1872 the lodge had enough members and enough confidence to do what lodges did in every new western town: put up the first substantial building and prove the place was going to last.

They bought the corner lot from Henry Menke for a thousand dollars and hired the contractor S. F. Hoole to build in brick, which almost nothing in Reno yet was. The plan called for a hall a hundred feet deep; the budget cut it to seventy-five, for $11,500. The walls were twenty inches thick and hollow, in the fashion of the time, with the lodge room on the second floor behind windows that were later bricked up for the sake of ritual privacy, and a storefront below to pay the mortgage. The cornerstone went in on October 15, 1872, laid by the Grand Master of Nevada, Jacob Van Bokkelen, who had eight months to live before a store of nitroglycerin in his rooms in Virginia City blew up and killed him along with nine of his neighbors. The hall opened with a grand ball the following February, seventy-five couples dancing until four in the morning.

What They Put in the Box

The lodge published the contents of the cornerstone the week it was sealed, and the list is the most revealing document the building ever produced. It is Reno, aged four, deciding what it wanted the future to know about itself.

There was the expected Masonic furniture: a set of Masonic studs and sleeve buttons, McCoy's Masonic Manual, a copy of the Masonic Mirror, the constitution and 1872 proceedings of the Grand Lodge, the names of every officer of the Grand Lodge and every officer and member of Reno Lodge No. 13, and the by-laws of Douglas Lodge No. 12 over in Genoa. There were the names of the state officers of Nevada, the county officers of Washoe, the California legislature of 1871–72, and the contractor, builder and architect of the hall. There were a dozen newspapers: the Nevada State Journal and the Reno Crescent, the Virginia City Enterprise and Chronicle, the Carson Register and Appeal, the Gold Hill News, the Sacramento Union, and the San Francisco Bulletin, Examiner, Post and Chronicle.

Then the money, which tells you what passed through a Reno till in 1872: a Carson City silver dollar and a San Francisco silver dollar of that year, a Spanish dollar of 1839, a Mexican dollar and a Mexican real, half and quarter gold dollars, two three-cent pieces, an English half sovereign and a quarter shilling, a wad of fractional currency and "several other American and foreign coins." Then the mining West in miniature: horn silver from the Eberhardt mine at Treasure Hill, ore from the Belcher on the Comstock, a piece of wood from Sutter's mill at Coloma and a specimen of quartz taken from its tail race, where the whole thing had started twenty-four years before.

And then the items that make it a portrait rather than a list. A railroad table of fares to all the Atlantic cities, because Reno existed to be a place you could leave by train. A mining stock report, because that was the weather. A corkscrew. And a harmonica. When the box was finally opened in 2019, the harmonica was reported as a mystery, something slipped in by a workman. It was not. It is on the list the lodge printed in October 1872, between the Masonic Manual and the fare table. Somebody put it there on purpose, and the newspaper wrote it down.

Fire, Honey and the State Treasurer

The storefront's first tenant was James Hagerman, who sold groceries, hardware, tinware, wines and liquor under the lodge room from the beginning of 1873. In 1879 he took a partner who was, at the time, the Treasurer of the State of Nevada, Jerry Schooling, which gives you a fair idea of how small and how intertwined the state's business still was. Groceries and hardware would be sold under that roof, by one firm or another, for the next ninety years.

The building earned its reputation early. Before dawn on March 2, 1879, a stovepipe fire behind the Railroad Hotel a few doors away got into the wooden town and took ten blocks of it, the depot included, with five or six people dead and more than a million dollars gone. The Masonic Hall, with its twenty-inch walls, came through only slightly scorched. Later that year the town learned that the hollow walls had been colonized by honeybees, and the local paper, in the manner of local papers, estimated the honey inside at ten tons. The lodge added twenty-five feet to the back of the building in 1881 and carried on.

Three Young Men Tired of a Salary

The name the building carried for most of its life arrived on March 30, 1895, when articles of incorporation were filed with the county clerk for the Reno Mercantile Company. The paper that evening explained it with some affection: three of the town's prominent young men had tired of working under a salary and concluded to enter the business world on their own hook. C. H. Eaton, E. Barber and H. M. Martin had bought into the store that W. O. H. Martin had been running at the corner, Martin keeping an interest, and the firm would carry on in the same line, wholesale and retail groceries, hardware and agricultural implements, at the corner of Sierra Street and Commercial Row, telephone 236.

The Masons, meanwhile, had outgrown the hall. They laid the cornerstone of a new temple on Virginia Street in 1905, held their first meeting there at the end of 1906, and sold the old building to the Mercantile, which remodeled it in 1907 and settled in for the long haul. An elevator went in during 1935. The Reno Mercantile Company sold hardware and groceries at that corner through two world wars, the whole of Prohibition and the Depression, and closed in 1970, seventy-five years after three clerks decided to work for themselves. A pawn shop took the ground floor until the mid-1980s. After that the oldest commercial building in Reno was a storage room for the casino next door, and then it was nothing at all.

Forty Years of Waiting

What happened next happened slowly, which is how most old buildings die. The hall sat empty from the mid-1970s. An environmental review for the railroad trench in 2000 called it eligible for the National Register; nobody ever listed it, on the national, state or city rolls. The casino that owned it said in 2005 that the foundation made restoration a losing proposition and declined to let anyone inside to argue. An engineering report in 2007 found a basement with its wooden columns failing. A developer promised to save it in 2011. By 2017 the roof had sagged eight inches, the walls were pushing outward, the city had ordered a safety fence around the corner, and the owners had spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on bracing just to keep it standing.

In October 2018 the hotel company that owned the block announced it would take the building down for a hundred-room extended-stay annex. Its engineer called demolition the safest and only course. The construction superintendent put it more memorably on the day the work began, December 12: the building had already fallen down, he said, it just didn't know it yet. They took it apart by hand over eight weeks, saving the bricks, the beams and the doors for the new building, and finished in January 2019.

Then they went looking for the cornerstone. The first holes they found in the corner were packed with brick, and for a while the crew believed the box had been looted a century ago. It had not. The granite stone was in the northwest corner, about three feet off the ground, and the lead box was still sealed. The director of the Nevada Historical Society opened it on February 14, 2019, and the city gathered in a concert hall that April, with the Mayor presiding and the Grand Master of Nevada and the Master of Reno Lodge No. 13 in attendance, to see the silver dollars and the Sutter's mill wood and the newspapers and the harmonica come out into the light after 146 years. The Masons agreed to lay a new cornerstone, with a new box, in whatever stands on the corner next.

Commercial Row

The corner the hall stood on was never quiet. Commercial Row faced the tracks and the depot, which made it the first thing a traveler saw of Reno and the last thing a Comstock miner saw before the train. The Wine House opened on the Row in 1874 and sold liquor through its back door for the whole of Prohibition; the alley behind the block was called Bottle Alley for good reason, and the clubs that would make Reno famous in the 1930s started in basements off it. The Masonic building had a basement too. It is the one part of the structure nobody photographed before it was filled and paved, and in a city with a long memory for what lies under its downtown, that is worth saying out loud.

At a Glance: The Masonic Hall, 98 West Commercial Row

• Built 1872–73 by Reno Lodge No. 13, F. & A. M. (chartered 1869), on a lot bought from Henry Menke for $1,000; contractor S. F. Hoole; two stories of brick, 35 by 75 feet, hollow walls twenty inches thick, cost $11,500.
• Cornerstone laid October 15, 1872, by Grand Master Jacob Van Bokkelen; grand opening ball February 21, 1873.
• The lead box held a dozen newspapers, Nevada and California silver dollars of 1872, Spanish and Mexican coins, horn silver from the Eberhardt, wood and quartz from Sutter's mill, a railroad fare table, a stock report, a corkscrew and a harmonica, among some forty items.
• Survived the Great Fire of March 2, 1879, which started a few doors away and burned ten blocks; honeybees colonized the hollow walls that year.
• Ground floor: James Hagerman's grocery and hardware from 1873 (with State Treasurer Jerry Schooling as partner from 1879); the Reno Mercantile Company, incorporated March 30, 1895, by C. H. Eaton, E. Barber and H. M. Martin, from 1895 until 1970.
• The Masons moved to their Virginia Street temple in 1906 and sold the hall to the Mercantile. Pawn shop until the mid-1980s; vacant and used for storage thereafter.
• Found eligible for the National Register in 2000 but never listed; more than $250,000 spent bracing it by 2017.
• Dismantled brick by brick December 2018–January 2019 for a hotel annex; the cornerstone and its sealed box recovered in February 2019 and opened by the Nevada Historical Society; a new cornerstone promised for the site.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was it really Reno's oldest building?

It was the oldest standing commercial building in Reno. A handful of older houses survive elsewhere in town, but nothing built for business predated the 1872 Masonic Hall, and nothing on Commercial Row came close.

What was in the cornerstone?

Roughly forty items sealed in a lead box in October 1872: newspapers from Reno, Virginia City, Carson, Gold Hill, Sacramento and San Francisco; silver dollars struck at Carson City and San Francisco that year; Spanish, Mexican and English coins; mining specimens from the Eberhardt and Belcher mines; wood and quartz from Sutter's mill; Masonic documents and jewelry; a railroad fare table; a stock report; a corkscrew; and a harmonica, which was on the Masons' own published list.

Why wasn't the building saved?

Forty years of vacancy did what the 1879 fire could not. By the time anyone with the means to restore it owned it, the roof had dropped eight inches, the walls were bowing, the basement columns were failing, and the owners had spent a quarter of a million dollars just keeping it upright. It was never listed on any historic register, which left no legal obstacle to demolition.

Where did the bricks go?

The building was taken apart by hand rather than knocked down, and the bricks, beams and doors were set aside to be reused in the new hotel building planned for the site.

Where is the time capsule now?

The contents were opened and catalogued by the Nevada Historical Society in February 2019 and shown publicly that April. The Masons of Reno Lodge No. 13 committed to laying a new cornerstone with a 2019 capsule in the replacement building. Ask the Historical Society in Reno about viewing the 1872 items.

Conclusion

A town that was four years old put a harmonica and a stock report and a table of train fares to the Atlantic in a lead box, buried it under a brick lodge hall by the tracks, and forgot about it for a century and a half while the hall sold hardware and groceries through fire, Prohibition and the Depression and then sat empty for forty years waiting for someone to care. The building is gone. The box came out intact, which is more than most of 1872 Reno can say. If there is a lesson in it for people in our line of work, it is the one the Masons understood when they sealed the stone: the objects are the record. Everything else is just the building around them.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of early Reno home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. The newspaper accounts drawn on here are the Nevada State Journal of October 19, 1872 (the cornerstone ceremony and the printed list of the box's contents), and the Reno Evening Gazette of March 30, 1895 (the incorporation of the Reno Mercantile Company).

• Reno Historical: Masonic Lodge No. 13 / Reno Mercantile — the building's entry in the University of Nevada's Reno history project.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society — publisher of FootPrints, whose Summer 2019 issue covers the building and the cornerstone.
• Nevada Historical Society — the Reno institution that opened and conserved the 1872 time capsule.
• Library of Congress: "Reno, the Commercial Center of Nevada" (1907) — the bird's-eye view of the city, with the Masonic Hall still standing on the Row.
• Chronicling America, Library of Congress — free digitized Nevada newspapers of the 1870s and after.

Hero image: "Reno, the Commercial Center of Nevada," a bird's-eye view of the city published in 1907, drawn by Grafton Tyler Brown. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division; public domain.