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Petra Munro Hendry, PhD, professor of education, Louisiana State University
Mv research focuses on the history of education in antebellum Louisiana and the role of Freemasonry in shaping a culture of public education. Masonic lodges of earlv 19th-century New Orleans are rarely treated by historians as institutions of learning, but they aided important education reforms underway nationally in the mid-1800s. With the influx of French refugees from Saint-Domingue beginning in the 1790s, as well as the arrival of German immigrants during the early 1840s, Freemasonry gained a cultural stronghold, and with it came Masonic lodges. These meeting places served as educational sites that strongly influenced the intellectual life of New Orleans.
The Collection’s holdings include the papers of FLtoile Polaire No. 4263, the French Masonic lodge founded in New Orleans in 1804, and the Germania Lodge No. 46, founded in 1844. Both lodges contributed to an interracial, international movement that championed a cosmopolitan “brotherhood of man,” a political ideal embodied by their commitment to universal education. Meeting records of Etoile Polaire from March 30, 1820, list members including Louis Moreau-Lislet, a refugee from Saint-Domingue and prominent French Creole lawyer, and Camille Brule, a free person of color and veteran of the War of 1812. The archives of the Germania Lodge provide rich evidence of the educational nature of Masonic lodges, which were multiethnic, multiclass, multilingual sites for study, lectures, and intellectual dialogue. The Germania Lodge’s library housed 168 books, including works on history, politics, and religion, as well as classical literature. Members of these fraternal organizations drew on this pro-education philosophy to abet the growth of public schools and universal access to non-religious education in New Orleans.
Germania Lodge No. 46
Free & Accepted Masons
160th Year Anniversary
c
F Masonic hall Etoile Polaire (North Star) on St. Claude Avenue
1978; photograph	»
by Owen F. Murphy Jr.
gift of the Arts Council of New Orleans,
7996.93.50
G.	Germania Lodge No. 46, Free and Accepted Masons, i6oth Year Anniversary 2004; pamphlet
gift of an anonymous donor, 2005.0289
Spring 2015	13