An Order founded for working people, by a working man.

The Order

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows was founded in Baltimore, Maryland on April 26, 1819 by Thomas Wildey, an English-born coachsmith who had emigrated to America two years earlier. He missed the mutual-aid societies of London, and so he placed an advertisement in the Baltimore American looking for men of like mind to start one here.

Five men met at the Seven Stars Tavern. They were called "odd" because in an era of professional guilds, most working men did not belong to any kind of society at all. They organized themselves anyway.

The Order grew. It spread north, south, and west. By the early twentieth century, the IOOF was the largest fraternity in the United States. It built orphanages and homes for the aged. It buried the dead when no one else could afford to. It is still doing those things, more quietly, today.

The Three Links

Our emblem is three interlocked chain links, each engraved with a letter: F for Friendship, L for Love, T for Truth. Together they are the order in which we are meant to learn them — friendship first, because that is where any good work begins.

The image of the three links became the visible symbol of the Order in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn from a much older biblical and classical lineage. We wear it on rings, paint it on lodge walls, and engrave it into headstones. It is shorthand for a commitment we hope outlasts us.

What we believe

The IOOF is nonpolitical and nonsectarian. We do not take positions on candidates, elections, or partisan issues. We do not require members to share a religion. We do require members to have a belief in a Supreme Being — that is the only doctrinal threshold, and it is left to each member to define for themselves.

Our charge, written into the rituals two centuries ago, is simple:

To visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan.

We try, in our small way, to keep it.

Kearsarge Lodge No. 217

Our lodge is chartered in Swampscott, Massachusetts, on the North Shore of Boston. We meet at 115 Elmwood Road on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month at 7:00 PM.

We are a small lodge. That is by design. A lodge has to be small enough that every brother knows every other brother, that visiting the sick is a name and not an abstraction, that a vote on a $10,000 contribution is a real conversation and not a procedural rubber stamp.

We are part of the larger Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, which is part of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the IOOF, which is in communion with Odd Fellows lodges in dozens of countries. The chain is long. We are one link on it.

What happens at a meeting

A meeting begins with a brief opening ritual. Old business — what we said we would do last time, and whether we did it. New business — what is in front of us. Then the heart of most meetings: we vet requests for help. An organization writes to us asking for support; a committee researches them; we discuss what we have learned; we vote.

We close, and we go for coffee.