#192 F.&A.M.
Table Lodge Dinner. 5:30pm Building tour, 6:00pm Lodge open on 1°, 6:15pm dinner. Celebrating Santa Barbara Lodge’s 140th anniversary.
Santa Barbara Masonic Lodge
16 East Carrillo Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 966-4502
The first boom in Santa Barbara from this immigration took place during the 1870's. Lots which had been held at $100 in 1870 brought $5000 four years later, the city's population grew 17 per cent, and the famous Hotel Arlington was built. This hotel was like many others shortly to be built all over Southern California, for the patronage of wealthy winter visitors from the East, and was an elegant establishment for what was then a dusty frontier village. Each of its ninety rooms had a fireplace and a marble mantel, running water and gaslight, and the rooms connected with the office by a speaking tube. It was one of the first hotels in America to plan elaborate entertainment for its guests. This included such affairs as organized picnics, tally-ho excursions flora and fauna expeditions, hunting trips and surf bathing parties. Hotel Arlington had been spoken of as a "rarely exotic freak of the landscape," and Santa Barbara as developing an unusual social life which was neither eastern nor western, fashionable or rustic, but a combination of all.
With this sudden surge in population and construction, the face of Santa Barbara began to change. Victorian houses soon outnumbered Spanish Colonials. Shipping grew in prominence, as goods and people from the East began pouring in through the small, but growing, port. This begins a period of great experimentation. Agriculture becomes even more important as people realize that just about anything planted here grows.
It was against such a background that Magnolia Lodge No. 242 was organized and chartered in 1875. The population of the city had grown to 3200, and it was felt that a new Lodge was needed. Santa Barbara Lodge 192 had also become a little exclusive; among the charter members of Magnolia Lodge we do not find a single member of Santa Barbara Lodge 192.
On November 1st of 1875, twenty nine Master Masons assembled in the Lodge Room of Santa Barbara Lodge No. 192 on the third floor of the Odd Fellows Building at the southeast corner of State and Haley Street to discuss the feasibility and desirability of forming a new Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. Those assembled favored the proposal and appointed a committee to procure a room where a new Lodge could hold meetings.