Reno's Masonic Temple on Virginia Street: The Architect Nobody Named

Above: the Masonic Temple on North Virginia Street as the fire-insurance surveyors drew it in 1918, labelled in the plate MASONIC BUILDING — LODGE RMS. ABOVE 1ST, with its arcade, its row of stores, the Truckee River and the concrete bridge below. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection.

On the last Monday of January 1966, with a burnt building coming down around them, a small group of men opened a block of granite.

It had been sealed on a Saturday afternoon in September 1905, in front of about seven hundred people, with wine and oil and grain strewn over it. Inside was the usual freight of a cornerstone: documents, booklets, a newspaper.

The stone had not been airtight.

Air had been getting in for sixty-one years, and almost all of the paper had rotted. The best-preserved thing in the box was the newspaper, and its front page carried a promise. That afternoon, it said, the Masons of Nevada would lay the cornerstone of what would be one of the finest Masonic Temples in the West.

Two of the men standing over the open stone had a reason to care more than the others. One was a Reno justice of the peace whose father had sealed it. The other had been a boy at the 1905 ceremony, standing beside his own father, who had helped lay the cornerstone of Reno's first Masonic temple in 1872.

And the man who drew the building has never been named in a single published account of it. Until now.

Not the Other One

Reno has had two Masonic buildings and they get confused constantly, so let us separate them before anything else.

The first was the Masonic Hall at Commercial Row and Sierra Street: cornerstone October 1872, two storeys of brick, thirty-five feet by seventy-five, eleven and a half thousand dollars. The lodge used it for thirty years, sold it in 1905, and it spent the rest of its long life as the Reno Mercantile building before being demolished in the winter of 2018.

The second is the subject here: the Masonic Temple at First and North Virginia Streets, on the west side of the street immediately north of the Virginia Street bridge. Cornerstone 16 September 1905. First meeting in it 8 December 1906. Burned 15 August 1965. Demolished 1966.

The two are joined by a single afternoon. On cornerstone day in 1905 the procession formed at the old temple and walked to the new one — east along Commercial Row to Virginia Street, then south down Virginia to First. Two hundred Masons in the line. They walked out of one building's history and into another's.

What stands on the site today is a third building, put up in 1967, still Masonic, still in use, and still housing the Grand Lodge of Nevada's library and museum.

Selling the Old Hall to Pay for the New

The money came from the building they were leaving.

In 1903 the Masons bought the lot at First and North Virginia for ten thousand five hundred dollars. A stock company, the Reno Masonic Temple Association, was organised to build on it, with capital stock of seventy-five thousand. Its president was J. B. McCullough; its secretary Robert Lewers; among its directors W. L. Bechtel, Richard Ryland and A. W. Holmes.

Then, in the classified columns of a Friday paper in March 1905, this:

“Property for Sale. — Bids for the Masonic hall at the corner of Commercial Row and Sierra street, will be received up to and including April 1, 1905… Address sealed bids to J. B. M’CULLOUGH, President Reno Masonic Temple Association.”

A small advertisement, three lines long, and it settles a question that has been loose in the record for years: the Masons put their first building on the market in the spring of 1905, by sealed bid, with a deadline of the first of April, to pay for the second.

Estimates of what the new temple finally cost run from seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars, but that is a figure a newspaper worked out in 1966 looking backwards. No contract price has ever been found.

The Sketch Submitted by Henry F. Starbuck

Here is the thing that has been sitting in a newspaper column since 1905, unread.

The temple was not simply commissioned. It was a competition. On the morning of the cornerstone ceremony the paper explained how the design had been arrived at, and the paragraph is worth having whole:

“Sketches of buildings were asked for and many excellent ones were submitted. The sketch submitted by Henry F. Starbuck was selected on account of its well arranged Masonic floor working plans. It is interesting to note that Mr. Starbuck has drawn the plans for Masonic buildings at Santa Rosa, Pasadena, Long Beach, Lompoc and Palo Alto. It is also worthy of note that this seems to be a year of building activity among the Masons, for in addition to those enumerated, several large Masonic structures are going up in San Francisco, as well as one in Berkeley and one in Vallejo.”

Read what that actually says. The Reno Masons ran a design competition, received several good entries, and chose one not for its elevation, its materials or its cost, but because the man who drew it understood how a Masonic floor has to work.

They were right about him, and they were better informed than any historian has been since.

Three months earlier the same paper had printed Starbuck's rendering of the proposed temple across the top of its front page, signed in the plate, bottom right: Henry F. Starbuck, Architect, 1905.

No published history of this building names him. Not the preservation society's entry, not the lodge's own histories, not the architectural literature. The two names people reach for when a large Reno building of this period comes up are Frederic DeLongchamps and George Ferris. It is neither. DeLongchamps had graduated from the University of Nevada the year before and would not open his Reno practice until about 1907; he was twenty-three and was not designing a hundred-thousand-dollar temple. Ferris has no Masonic Temple in any list of his work.

Who Starbuck Was

He is not an obscure figure once you know the name. He is simply a figure nobody had connected to Reno.

Henry Fletcher Starbuck was born on 1 March 1850 at Nantucket, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of a whaling captain — a man who, by one account, had come out of the Azores as a cabin boy and ended up master of the Franklin and the Daniel Webster.

He finished his education in Boston and was apprenticed there to an architect named Abel C. Martin. He was in partnership in Boston by 1873, had an office in New Brunswick by 1877, went to Chicago in 1879 — where he began with engineering work, refrigeration and heavy machinery, before taking rooms in the Ashland Block — and spent a spell in Milwaukee. By 1894 he was in San Diego with a reputation as a specialist in church architecture. Los Angeles followed in 1896, an office in Long Beach in 1899, a Mission-style Methodist church at Fresno in 1902, and then Oakland.

Oakland is where he was when Reno wanted a temple.

And this is the part that explains the choice. Starbuck was himself a Freemason, and he had made fraternal buildings a speciality. In 1905 — the same year as Reno — he published an article in the leading West Coast architectural journal titled “Architecture of Masonic and other Fraternal Buildings.” That autumn the same journal reproduced his lodge designs for Palo Alto and Santa Rosa in its October and November numbers.

So when the Reno committee said they had picked his sketch for its well arranged Masonic floor working plans, they had picked the man who was, that year, literally writing the paper on the subject.

There is a second thing the Reno column gives us that the published accounts of his life do not. The standard lists of Starbuck's Masonic work name Palo Alto, Santa Rosa and Long Beach. The 1905 Reno paper names those three and adds Pasadena and Lompoc. Two more lodges, and a sixth building — Reno's own — that no list has ever carried.

He went on from Reno to design the Masonic lodge hall at Hilo, in Hawaii — plans ready by the end of March 1906, ground broken in 1908, cornerstone February 1909, dedicated February 1910, and on the National Register of Historic Places since 1994. He sailed out to oversee it himself and was dismissed partway through, which is its own story.

After 1910 he moved to Fresno, where he built churches for twenty years, and he died on 21 August 1935, aged eighty-five, at the Masonic Home in Decoto, California.

A whaling captain's son from Nantucket, who became a Mason, who specialised in the buildings of his own order, who drew Reno's temple in a competition in 1905, and who died in a home his brethren kept.

What He Drew

The June 1905 description of the proposed building is unusually full, and it is worth setting out because almost none of it survives in any later account.

One hundred and forty feet of frontage on Virginia Street, a hundred feet deep, four storeys, with a cellar under the whole thing.

Street floor: five stores to let, and a large hallway serving the floors above. An arcade running the entire front.

Second floor: nine offices, on the river side and along about two thirds of the Virginia Street frontage. One of the two lodge rooms — the Blue Lodge room, sixty feet long by thirty-eight wide.

Third floor: the second lodge room, the same size as the one below, for the Commandery, the Consistory and the Shrine. Both lodge rooms twenty-four feet high. North of the upper room, a chapel thirty feet square, and anterooms.

Fourth floor: above the lodge room, a drill hall and banquet room sixty feet wide and about eighty-five long, with a well equipped kitchen off it.

Steam heat. A ventilating system the paper thought worth praising. Space left for a lift, though whether to install one had not been decided. Built-in cedar cases for the regalia in the lodge rooms — a small detail, and the only description anywhere of the fitted furniture inside this building.

And two wide stairways down to the street, one to Virginia and one to First, “so that in case of fire it will be easy to get out of the building.”

One thing was still undecided three months before the cornerstone went down: whether to build in stone or in brick. Only the seven pillars across the front and the trim were certain to be stone.

How much of this got built, and when, is less clear than it should be. Four storeys were planned and a 1910 postcard shows four. The fire-insurance surveyors in 1918 marked it three and a half — and marked part of it still unfinished, twelve years after the lodge moved in. Later descriptions call it three storeys. The honest position is that it was designed as four over a cellar, built out in stages, and never quite completed as drawn.

Wine, Oil and Grain

Saturday 16 September 1905, a quarter to three in the afternoon.

About seven hundred Masons were present, from Reno, Sparks, Carson, Virginia City, the southern and eastern mining camps and across the line in California. Two hundred or more walked in the procession, the Knights Templar at its head as escort to the Grand Lodge officers.

The granite block had been cut by J. M. McCormack, a past Grand Master of Nevada, with his own hands. It carried the Masonic emblem on one face and, on another, the initials of the man about to set it: C. A. Beemer, M. W. G. M.

Charles A. Beemer, Most Worshipful Grand Master, smoothed the mortar and gave the signal to lower the stone. Wine, oil and grain were strewn over it.

The officers around him: Kyle, Deputy Grand Master; Robert Lewers, Senior Grand Warden; C. P. Fulstone, Junior Grand Warden; W. L. Cox and B. C. Maris, the Grand Deacons; W. M. David, Grand Marshal; C. N. Noteware, Grand Secretary; S. M. Jamison, Grand Treasurer; E. D. Kelley, Grand Bible Bearer. The Reverend Samuel Unsworth of Reno gave the oration; the Reverend T. L. Bellam of Sparks the prayer.

T. J. Steinmetz, Master of the Reno lodge, missed the whole thing. He had been taken ill on the Friday night.

Fifty feet away, on the same corner in the same season, another crew was at work: construction on the Virginia Street bridge had begun on 17 July 1905 and it opened to traffic on 12 November. The temple and the bridge rose together, and the bridge is still there.

A Lodge on Top of a Row of Shops

It is easy to think of a Masonic temple as a temple. This one was a commercial block with a lodge on the upper floors, and the rents are what made it possible.

The N. E. Wilson Drug Company took the ground floor from 1906 and stayed until the 1950s. Brundidge's Art Supplies and the Grey Shop were there in the 1930s. The Nevada Bank of Commerce took ground-floor quarters in 1946. Dentists and lawyers kept the second floor throughout.

By the summer of 1965 the tenant list read: the bank on the ground floor; Frederick O. Herz & Bro., jewellers, with a repair room upstairs; Menards Ltd., clothing; Lester Conklin, furrier; Lloyd Gotchy, shoes; the Siamese Room Cocktail Lounge on West First Street; Gene Christensen, photographer, in a five-room suite on the second floor; and the attorneys Clyde Souter and Smith.

A drug store, a jeweller, a furrier, a shoe shop and a cocktail lounge, with the Blue Room, the Red Room, the chapel and the Rainbow Girls Room over the top of them.

In 1956 an addition went up alongside, facing West First Street, with the Virginia Room and a Scottish Rite auditorium in it. The hallways joining old to new were fitted with fire doors. Remember those.

Twenty-Seven Minutes Past Two

Sunday 15 August 1965.

Jesse Anders, the building's maintenance supervisor, smelled smoke. He traced it to somewhere under the floor near his cleaning equipment room, could not find any fire, and telephoned the fire department.

The alarm went in at 2.27 a.m. — one minute after Reno's firemen had been sent to a different call across town.

They arrived to find smoke through much of the building and immediately turned in a second alarm. The fire had been burning under the floor. It came up through it into the cleaning room and into Christensen's photographic studios next door, then burned down through the ceiling of the bank below and swept across the upper part of the bank's premises.

Assistant Chief Harry Van Meter, who had come straight from the other call: “The bank had some smoke in it. The halls upstairs were filled with smoke. We traced the heat down with breathing apparatus and into the second floor area.”

It was under control by about four and struck out a quarter of an hour later. Under two hours.

Nobody was seriously hurt. Four firemen were given oxygen at the scene for smoke inhalation. Captain Frank Romer cut his hand and was sent for an anti-tetanus injection.

Upstairs, the lodge took it badly. The Red Room and the chapel on the third floor lost part of their floor where the flames reached that height. The Rainbow Girls Room was smoke-damaged, and so was the Blue Room on the second.

What saved the rest were the 1956 fire doors in the connecting hallways, which firemen credited with keeping the fire out of the new section entirely. The Virginia Room and the Scottish Rite auditorium came through untouched, and the lodge was able to go on meeting in them.

And the cause? It was never established. Investigators worked the scene through Sunday and Monday and had nothing by Monday morning; five days later the department was still trying to determine it. A burglar alarm had gone off in the building and turned out to be false, with no apparent connection. Firemen had also been called to the building at seven o'clock the previous evening, and what that was about does not survive in the record.

One more fact, which belongs here and which has to be handled carefully. The call that went out one minute before the Masonic alarm was to two separate fires that had broken out simultaneously at an apartment building across town — one in a trash chute, one in a mattress store in the garage. The fire marshal suspected arson there and said so. No source connects the two incidents, and nothing suggests the temple fire was set. But the record is what it is: a suspected double arson at one address, and at another, sixty seconds later, a fire under a floor that nobody was ever able to explain.

The Lenses

The sharpest loss that night was not structural.

Gene Christensen had a five-room photographic studio on the second floor, directly beside the cleaning room where the fire came up through the boards. He put his losses at twelve to fifteen thousand dollars in equipment and furnishings and said he carried about sixty per cent insurance.

What he actually mourned was the glass:

“You spend maybe 20 years acquiring old, good lenses. Some were from Germany. I’ll never replace them.”

Elsewhere he said some of the lenses and other equipment “were really irrepraceable, fine old ones from Germany which you can't get any more.” The misspelling is the paper's and it is left as it stands.

Anybody who collects anything will recognise exactly what he was describing. Twenty years is not a shopping trip. It is a lifetime of watching, buying one at a time, from a country whose optical industry had been cut in half by a war and then divided by a border. He was not insured for that, because nobody is.

On the Monday morning he walked out of the building carrying an aerial camera that had somehow escaped serious damage, and said: “and I still have my plane and another camera at my house for candid wedding pictures. I'm still in business.”

He intended to start again from scratch, possibly in the new part of the same building.

Of everything in this story, Christensen's lenses are the one class of object that is positively documented as destroyed. No organ, altar, officers' chairs, tracing boards or aprons are named in any account of the fire, and no sale or dispersal of the lodge's furnishings has been found. If you are a dealer hoping that 1905 Reno Masonic material came onto the market in 1966, the evidence says it did not.

Opening the Stone

The building did not fall down. It was condemned on paper.

The two lodge rooms in the 1905 structure were shut pending the investigation. By November the city's chief building inspector, Ronald Coleman, had ruled that the building had wooden floors and could not be used for assembly of any kind above the first floor. Bring it up to code or take it down.

Bob Drake, chairman of the Masonic Temple Association, put the fire damage at about forty per cent and said the insurance “would not begin to cover construction costs” of a replacement, which he guessed at around a million dollars. “We will replace it with a new building. But we don't know what kind.”

Demolition was deliberately held back until after the first of the year, so that Menards and Herz Bros. would not lose their Christmas trade.

On 31 January 1966 they opened the cornerstone.

The contents were, in the reporter's word, disappointing. The stone had not been airtight and oxygen had decayed almost all the papers and booklets. What came out best was a copy of the Journal — the cornerstone-day edition, eight pages, whose front page had promised one of the finest Masonic temples in the West, and which had spent sixty-one years in a box proving the promise mortal.

Two other stories in that preserved edition came up with it, by accident. One was headed “REAL ESTATE IS BOOMING”: transfers over the past three months indicated a prosperous and rapid growth of the city, and “the southside of the river seems to be the most active part.” The other was headed “FAIR CO-EDS ARE SCARED BY A GREAT BIG GUN” — an account of Miss Bertha Kain at the University of Nevada seeing off a crowd of co-eds intent on hazing her by producing a .44 revolver and shouting “Now throw me in the lake,” whereupon they “lost no time in taking to the tall uncut.”

Among the men examining the contents were William Beemer, Reno justice of the peace, whose father Charles had sealed the stone and cut his initials into it — and Silas E. Ross, who had been at the 1905 ceremony as a boy with his father Orrin C. Ross, who had himself taken an active part in the cornerstone ceremonies for Reno's first Masonic temple in 1872.

Three buildings, three cornerstones, two families, ninety-four years.

And then the decision about what to do with a box of ruined paper. The trustees favoured keeping it and one day putting it in a historical room planned for the new temple.

The new temple opened in 1967, cost about eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and is still there at 40 West First Street, where the Grand Lodge of Nevada keeps its offices and its library and museum.

Whether the historical room was ever built, and whether that box is in it, nobody has checked.

What Is Still Open

Four things, and the first one is a phone call.

Is the 1905 cornerstone material still at 40 West First Street? The trustees said in 1966 they wanted to keep it for a historical room in the new building. The new building has a Masonic library and museum in it. Nobody has asked. One call to the Grand Lodge of Nevada would turn this article from good to settled.

Who built it. Starbuck drew it; no contractor has been found in any notice located. For a hundred-thousand-dollar building in a town of that size, the builder should be findable.

The earlier fire. The 1965 reporting mentions, in passing, that an earlier fire in the old portion of the building had destroyed the Wilson drug store “several years ago.” No date is given and none has been found. This building burned at least twice and only one of those fires is remembered.

What else Starbuck did. The 1905 Reno column names Masonic buildings by him at Santa Rosa, Pasadena, Long Beach, Lompoc and Palo Alto. The published lists of his work carry three of those five. Two California lodges, and Reno's own temple, are missing from the record of a man who has a biography. Somebody should put them back.

And one correction for anybody who goes looking. A widely circulated account of Reno's Masonic buildings dates this fire to 1955. It was 1965, and both Reno papers covered it at length on the sixteenth of August that year.

Resources & Further Reading

The design competition, the selection of Henry F. Starbuck's sketch “on account of its well arranged Masonic floor working plans,” his Masonic buildings at Santa Rosa, Pasadena, Long Beach, Lompoc and Palo Alto, the 1905 Masonic building boom in San Francisco, Berkeley and Vallejo, and the 140-foot frontage, five stores, nine second-floor offices and sixty-by-thirty-eight-foot Blue Lodge room are all from the Nevada State Journal of Saturday 16 September 1905, page 8, under the headline “New Temple For Nevada Masons.” Starbuck's signed rendering and the fuller description of the planned building — four storeys, the cellar, the arcade, the two twenty-four-foot lodge rooms, the thirty-foot chapel, the sixty-by-eighty-five-foot drill hall, the cedar cases for regalia, the steam heat, the space left for a lift, the undecided stone-or-brick question and the two stairways “so that in case of fire it will be easy to get out of the building” — are from the same paper of Sunday 11 June 1905, page 1. The cornerstone ceremony, the officers present, the procession route from the old temple, the granite block cut by J. M. McCormack and the wine, oil and grain are from the Nevada State Journal of Sunday 17 September 1905, page 1. The sale advertisement for the Commercial Row hall is from the same paper of Friday 24 March 1905, page 6.

The fire of 15 August 1965 — Jesse Anders, the 2.27 a.m. alarm, Harry Van Meter, Frank Romer, the fire doors credited with saving the 1956 addition, and the suspected arson at the other address one minute earlier — is from the Reno Evening Gazette of Monday 16 August 1965, pages 1 and 2, and the Nevada State Journal of the same date, pages 1 and 8. The damage to the Red Room, the chapel, the Blue Room and the Rainbow Girls Room, Gene Christensen's losses and his quotations about the German lenses, and the Nevada Bank of Commerce taking ground-floor quarters in 1946, are from the Nevada State Journal of 16 August 1965, page 8. The condemnation of the lodge rooms and the three alternatives considered are from the Reno Evening Gazette of Friday 20 August 1965, page 24. Bob Drake, Ronald Coleman, the forty per cent figure and the delay of demolition for the Christmas trade are from the Reno Evening Gazette of Thursday 4 November 1965, page 1. The opening of the cornerstone, the decayed contents, the preserved newspaper and its two other stories, William Beemer, Silas E. Ross and the proposed historical room are from Robert Kauth's report, “Cornerstone Tells Of Reno's History,” in the Nevada State Journal of Tuesday 1 February 1966, page 8.

Starbuck's life — his birth at Nantucket on 1 March 1850 to a whaling captain, his Boston apprenticeship under Abel C. Martin, his practice in Chicago from 1879, San Diego by 1894, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland, his membership of the craft, his 1905 article “Architecture of Masonic and other Fraternal Buildings” and the reproduction of his Palo Alto and Santa Rosa lodge designs in the October and November 1905 numbers of the same journal, his later Fresno practice and his death at the Masonic Home at Decoto on 21 August 1935 — is drawn from his published biography and from John Edward Powell's 1995 account of his career for the architectural history of Fresno. His authorship of the Hilo Masonic lodge hall, built 1908 to 1910 and on the National Register since 1994, is documented in that building's own history. None of those accounts mentions Reno.

The 1918 street numbers, the arcade, the ground-floor uses and the unfinished portion of the building are read from the Sanborn fire insurance map of Reno for 1918, sheet 7. Reno renumbered its streets after that survey, so the 1918 numbers on the Virginia Street frontage are not the modern ones. Two dates in circulation should be treated with care: the 1956 addition is given variously as 1953 and 1955 elsewhere, and both Reno papers in 1965 say 1956; and the fire is misdated to 1955 in at least one widely read account.

• Library of Congress, Sanborn Maps Collection — the 1918 Reno volume and seven others, all public domain, and the only unambiguous picture of this building's plan.
• Grand Lodge of Nevada — at 40 West First Street, on the site, with the library and museum where the 1905 cornerstone material was meant to go.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society — its Reno Historical entry on the temple, and period photographs of the building's face that are not otherwise published.
• The Masonic Hall on Commercial Row: Reno's Oldest Building and the Box in the Cornerstone — the 1872 building they left, and the cornerstone that came out of it.
• Frederic DeLongchamps: The Mining Engineer Who Built Nevada — the architect everybody assumes designed this, who was twenty-three and still a year from opening his office.
• Under Reno: The Tunnels Beneath Downtown and the Buildings That Still Hide Them — the same two blocks, below street level.
• The Reno Arch: How a City Became the Biggest Little in the World — Virginia Street a few steps north, in the years the temple was standing.

A note on the image: no photograph of this building exists in a collection that permits commercial reuse. Period views are held by a preservation society and a university archive, neither of which offers a licence, and a 1910 postcard of the temple with the public library beside it sits in a museum collection with no rights statement attached. The Sanborn sheet at the head of this article is a federal public-domain document and is the only picture of the building that can be published freely. Where the record is silent — on the builder, on the cause of the fire, on where the cornerstone box is now — this article says so rather than guessing.