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Jacksonville Odd Fellows lodge closed State leader shuts it down By MELISSA MARTIN JACKSONVILLE -- One of the state's oldest Odd Fellow lodges is no more after officials from Portland changed the locks on the doors and carried away the seal and the 139-year-old framed charter. Although Jacksonville Odd Fellows waited for the arrival of the grand master -- or state leader -- Wednesday morning, he didn't show up at the scheduled time but came later when the fraternal brothers left for lunch. Photo by Bob Pennell Jim Miller, left, Pete Burg and Alex Smith wait outside the Jacksonville Odd Fellows hall Wednesday for organization officials from Portland to arrive and shut down their hall. State officials arrived after the local lodge members left. "We're going to appeal to the Sovereign Grand Lodge," or national branch of the organization, said Doug Davis, leader of the Jacksonville group. Lodge members waited on a corner of Oregon and Main streets Wednesday morning. Finally, Davis locked the steel double doors that once protected Jacksonville settlers from Indian attacks and joined his lodge brothers at the bottom of the staircase. "I'm going home," said Alex Smith, the chapter's secretary. "I don't want anything more to do with this." But at about 2 p.m., a Grand Lodger arrived in town and changed the lock. The Rebekah Lodge, the Odd Fellows' sister organization, will continue to use the building. And they will continue leasing the downstairs portion to Loaves and Fishes, a meal program that's been serving lunches to Jacksonville seniors for the past 18 years, said Ileane Davis, a Rebekah member. Her husband, an Odd Fellow for 40 years and a retired Boise Cascade planer, said losing the club will be hard. "How would you feel if your house burned down? That's how we feel about losing this place," Davis said. Changing the locks and removing the charter came after the Grand Lodge executive committee met in Salem on Feb. 5 and voted to suspend indefinitely the charter of Jacksonville Lodge, one of the first 10 lodges established in Oregon. Charles Carter, the grand master, declined to comment Wednesday except to say, "We hate what has taken place." In a certified letter sent to Jacksonville's 23 members, the state secretary wrote "the lodge was acting with conduct unbecoming of Odd Fellows and Odd Fellowship." At the heart of the dispute are repairs made to the old brick building. The first Jacksonville Odd Fellows rented the McCully building, a former dry goods store, for the first five years of the chapter's life. Pioneer photographer Peter Britt paid off the $500 mortgage and gave the building to the lodge in 1865. The Odd Fellows have met there since. Local Odd Fellows say the trouble with the state group started after they hired the son of member Kindred Thomas to reroof the lodge in 1995. They say Thomas, the group's secretary at the time, paid his son John Thomas more than $15,000 to reroof the lodge. When the new roof began to leak, members were dismayed to learn that John Thomas was not licensed or bonded. Thomas was fined $2,500 by the state Construction Contractors Board last year for the incident. By the time a new contractor fixed the problem, the total cost of the project had risen to about $26,000. The Grand Lodge has frozen the Jacksonville group's bank account of $80,000, said treasurer Jim Miller. About $70,000 of that money came from the sale of Ashland and Medford Independent Order of Odd Fellows buildings. "They even took the $5,000 that was put in our trust by a widow who asked us to take care of her husband's grave at the Jacksonville Cemetery," Miller said. "I'm responsible for that money and I haven't signed off on it." It was unclear Wednesday which group actually has control over the bank accounts and the building. Miller said he plans to talk to his attorney about it. The charter should stay in Jacksonville for the sake of its faithful members, Miller said, standing in the middle of the carpeted meeting hall filled with costumes, black-and-white photographs of long-bearded men, glass cases with medals left behind by deceased members and a pot-bellied stove, once the room's only heat source. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA