They were short one member.<\/p>\n
So my mother did what practical women of that generation often did\u2014she solved the problem directly. She added me to the roster.<\/p>\n
I was a little boy, suddenly and improbably counted among professional women, sitting in rooms where business was discussed, decisions were made, and\u2014more importantly for me\u2014stories were told.<\/p>\n
That is how I came to know Opal. ![](\"https:\/\/scontent-lax7-1.xx.fbcdn.net\/v\/t39.30808-6\/677627175_26797250989906676_4403846000709642289_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=13d280&_nc_ohc=fZfWTtrD5y0Q7kNvwGdBfZk&_nc_oc=Adpskttg8xeLbCuVchmlxWubCFO-WZJG9suVy1FnwrK0KMmWBgD_w0Gbt7BumhNPWbaoxsaz20omdN7nTkFVA4vT&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-lax7-1.xx&_nc_gid=_0PgfgJJBkr1C9yGin29Wg&_nc_ss=7a3a8&oh=00_Af1FgYd2aaH_zTrcq2icNG9VLwYcbvhJeuDVKio24m3KcQ&oe=69EE51DC\")
<\/p>\n
\n
Why They Chose Me<\/h3>\n
Looking back, I don\u2019t think the membership technicality is what mattered to Opal. It simply opened the door.<\/p>\n
What mattered was proximity\u2014and perhaps something they recognized in me that I didn\u2019t yet understand myself.<\/p>\n
Opal was not reserved. She spoke plainly, and she spoke often. But when she told certain stories\u2014about the lodge, about the early days of El Dorado\u2014her tone shifted. Those weren\u2019t for the room. Those were passed more deliberately.<\/p>\n
The same was true of Selma White.<\/p>\n
Twice in my childhood\u2014both times before I was ten\u2014older women took me aside, out of the general conversation, and told me history as if it were something fragile. Something that needed a carrier.<\/p>\n
There was no ceremony to it. No formal instruction. Just the quiet assumption that I would remember.<\/p>\n
And now, decades later, I understand the implicit contract: I was meant to repeat<\/em> them.<\/p>\n The building still stands in El Dorado\u2014what was once called Mud Springs\u2014its brick face carrying more history than most people realize. Above the old store sits Hiram Lodge No. 43, Free and Accepted Masons<\/strong>, chartered May 6, 1854.<\/p>\n That part is documented.<\/p>\n According to a historical marker dedicated in 2005 by the Native Sons of the Golden West, the lodge first met in rented spaces before completing its brick building in 1862. It burned in the devastating El Dorado fire of September 17, 1923<\/strong>, and was later rebuilt using the original bricks, reopening on March 26, 1925.<\/p>\n Those are the official facts.<\/p>\n But what I was told fills in the spaces between them.<\/p>\n Opal once told me a story about the lodge\u2019s earliest days\u2014back when El Dorado was still rough-edged and not yet settled into law.<\/p>\n She said that when the lodge was first organized, it needed a Master to formally open and conduct meetings. So, the Master from Placerville would walk\u2014on foot\u2014from Placerville to El Dorado once a week. He didn\u2019t ride. He didn\u2019t hurry. He walked, with his dog beside him.<\/p>\n He would open the lodge, stay the night, and walk home in the morning.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never found that story in any official record. But I\u2019ve learned not to dismiss things simply because they weren\u2019t written down.<\/p>\n Early El Dorado County wasn\u2019t always recorded\u2014it was remembered.<\/p>\n There was another story Opal told me\u2014one she did not embellish, and did not soften.<\/p>\n She and her husband, Red, lived across the alley from the lodge. In those days, she said, there wasn\u2019t always formal law enforcement in the way we understand it today. Decisions\u2014serious ones\u2014were sometimes made inside those lodge meetings.<\/p>\n \u201cOne time,\u201d she said, \u201cthere was a truly bad man in town.\u201d<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t name him. She didn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n The lodge met. A decision was made.<\/p>\n The next morning, she told me, she stepped outside and saw the man lying dead in the alley.<\/p>\n She turned and called into the house: The official version, she acknowledged, was that the man was found at the cemetery up the hill.<\/p>\n \u201cOfficial,\u201d she said, with a tone that made the word do all the work.<\/p>\n What is<\/em> documented is how close the town came to losing everything.<\/p>\n The 1923 fire, which began at the California Door Company in nearby Diamond Springs, destroyed roughly 30 buildings and nearly wiped El Dorado off the map. The Masonic Temple was among those lost.<\/p>\n But the records\u2014the lifeblood of any lodge\u2014were saved.<\/p>\n Accounts note that a man named Jos. Windel, along with others from Placerville, rushed into the burning structure to retrieve them. Without those records, much of the lodge\u2019s early history would have vanished entirely.<\/p>\n During the rebuilding, the Masons met at the I.O.O.F. Hall in Diamond Springs\u2014free of charge, a gesture that still echoes as an example of fraternal solidarity in the county\u2019s early years.<\/p>\n If Opal gave me the stories of the lodge, Selma White gave me something else entirely\u2014land, lineage, and the complicated arrangements people don\u2019t put in newspapers.<\/p>\n She told me about John White, a landowner tied to early Highway 50 commerce, when the route followed much of what we now call Mother Lode Drive. He operated a service garage for trucks\u2014small by today\u2019s standards\u2014on property that still exists near the corner of 6556 Mother Lode Drive and Lindbergh.<\/p>\n She showed me something I\u2019ve never forgotten: what she claimed was an \u201copen\u201d marriage license between John and his earlier wife, Zorra\u2014a woman Selma described as a 1920s flapper who came west before settling in Placerville.<\/p>\n Selma said Zorra had freedom\u2014unusual for the time\u2014and that pieces of land were given away to lovers. She pointed out neighboring parcels as proof, naming families and properties as if tracing a map only she could fully see.<\/p>\n Whether every detail holds under modern scrutiny is a question for historians and records offices. But the land itself\u2014the parcels, the structures, the layout\u2014still reflects a past shaped by personalities as much as by paperwork.<\/p>\n What ties all of this together, for me, isn\u2019t just the lodge or the fire or even the stories themselves.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the women.<\/p>\n Opal. Selma. My mother. My grandmother.<\/p>\n They moved across states, across circumstances\u2014St. Louis to Chicago, Chicago to South Lake Tahoe\u2014making decisions that reshaped their lives and, quietly, the lives around them.<\/p>\n They were not passive figures in history. They were authors of it.<\/p>\n And they chose, for reasons I\u2019m still working out, to pass pieces of that history to a kid who hadn\u2019t yet learned how to question it properly.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a line I\u2019ve come to respect over the years:<\/p>\n \u201cHistory is what is written. Memory is what is carried.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n El Dorado County has both.<\/p>\n The charter date of Hiram Lodge No. 43\u2014May 6, 1854\u2014is a matter of record. The fire of 1923 is documented. The rebuilding in 1925 is confirmed.<\/p>\n But the man in the alley, the walk from Placerville, the quiet decisions behind closed doors\u2014those belong to memory.<\/p>\n And memory, fragile as it is, doesn\u2019t survive unless someone repeats it.<\/p>\n I was told to pass it on.<\/p>\n That was the assignment.<\/p>\n Not to prove it. Not to polish it. Just to make sure it didn\u2019t disappear when the people who carried it were gone.<\/p>\n So this is me, doing exactly that.<\/p>\n If your family has ties to these names\u2014Sadler, White, Windel, or the early Masons of El Dorado\u2014you may hold pieces that confirm, correct, or deepen what I\u2019ve shared here.<\/p>\n Because in a place like this, history isn\u2019t finished.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still being remembered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A first-person account of Hiram Lodge No. 43 in El Dorado, blending documented history with oral stories passed down by local women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"thumbnail":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"medium_large":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"large":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"1536x1536":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"2048x2048":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"darknews-slider-full":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"darknews-featured":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"darknews-medium":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker.jpg",540,506,false],"darknews-medium-square":["http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Coin-Hal_Barker-350x350.jpg",350,350,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"News MoLo","author_link":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/author\/admin\/"},"category_info":"LifeStyle<\/a>","tag_info":"LifeStyle","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10560"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10562,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560\/revisions\/10562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.newsmolo.com\/EDC\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I was never meant to keep<\/em> these stories.<\/p>\n
\nThe Lodge Above the Store<\/h3>\n
\nA Walk Between Towns<\/h3>\n
\nWhen the Lodge Was the Law<\/h3>\n
\u201cRed! Get that body out of here!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nFire, Survival, and Record Keepers<\/h3>\n
\nSelma, Zorra, and the Land That Split<\/h3>\n
\nThe Women Who Carried It<\/h3>\n
\nMemory vs. Record<\/h3>\n
\nWhy I\u2019m Writing This Now<\/h3>\n