A Building With a Story
Stone, Square, and Compass on Seventh Avenue
The Grand Lodge of Tennessee stands at the corner of Seventh Avenue North and Broadway in downtown Nashville, a Neoclassical temple of Indiana limestone, square and compass carved into the stone above its doors. Designed by the Nashville firm of Asmus & Clark and completed in 1925 for the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the building was acquired by the Grand Lodge of Tennessee in 1937 and has served ever since as the seat of Tennessee Freemasonry and the home of its museum and library.
The Building
Designed for the Ages
The building was designed in the Classical Revival style, the architectural language of the early-twentieth-century American civic ideal, and executed in cut Indiana limestone, the same stone that faces much of official Washington. Engaged Ionic columns articulate the west facade; Ionic pilasters carry the order down the long Broadway side. Because the building was raised for the Scottish Rite, Masonic emblems are worked into the stone above the second-story windows as part of the original design.
Inside, marble corridors lead to a Lodge Room that occupies the full height of the top three stories, a great auditorium of more than a thousand seats arranged around a checkered pavement of black and white marble. It is one of the largest and most architecturally significant Masonic interiors in the American South.
The Lodge Room
The Checkered Pavement
The pavement of the Lodge Room, alternating squares of black and white marble, is among the oldest symbols in the Craft, recalling the floor of King Solomon's Temple and standing for the joys and sorrows that visit every life under heaven. The conferral of the Three Degrees of Symbolic Masonry has been practiced upon this floor by Tennessee brethren since the building was acquired by the Grand Lodge.
Above the pavement rise tiers of red theater seating that accommodate the annual communications of the Grand Lodge, when delegates from more than two hundred subordinate lodges across the state gather in joint convocation.
The Library
A Reading Room of the Craft
The library of the Grand Lodge of Tennessee houses thousands of volumes on the history, philosophy, and practice of the Craft, many of them quite rare, some dating to the early eighteenth century. Above the bookcases hang oil portraits of the Past Grand Masters of Tennessee, watching over the work of the brethren who study in the room below. The library is open to scholars and visitors by appointment.
