Household of Ruth

Annual meeting of the Odd Fellows and Households of Ruth.

In 1976, Wilson’s lodges hosted the 94th annual district Odd Fellows and Household of Ruth meeting. Hannibal Lodge #1552, founded in 1873, was older than the district. The county’s first Household of Ruth lodge was established in 1887. Excited as I was to part its covers, the souvenir booklet contains no lodge history or historic photographs and, within a decade after this conference, the lodge was essentially defunct.

Thank you, M.B. Ward.

Wilson County G.U.O.O.F. lodges.

I’ve been operating under the assumption there was one Grand United Order of Odd Fellows lodge in Wilson County — Hannibal Lodge #1552. I was wrong. Deeds from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal these others, about which I’m seeking more information:

  • Lucama Lodge #3561

Per Charles H. Brooks’ The Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America (1902), Lucama Lodge was established in 1892:

  • Moyton Lodge #5101, established before 1903.

Moyton was a community adjacent and just south of Stantonsburg.

  • Fairview Lodge, established before 1909.
  • Lodge #5575, established before 1925.
  • Lodge #5785, established before 1912.
  • Zion Hall Lodge #5952, established before 1905.

Zion Hall was located in the Grabneck community along Nash Street, northwest of downtown Wilson.

  • Black Creek Lodge #8754, established before 1915.

Per Brooks, the Black Creek lodge established in 1891 was assigned #3446, but the higher lodge number listed in the deed suggests that #8754 was a later lodge in Black Creek.

Hannibal, of course, was the oldest of all Wilson County G.U.O.O.F. lodges, founded in 1873:

I also found reference in Brooks’ work to the establishment in Wilson of a Household of Ruth, an order founded “to enlist the sympathies and assistance of women in behalf of the Grand United Order of Oddfellows and to unite the wives, daughters and other sisters more intimately with their fathers, husbands, and other brothers of the Order in working out the beauties of Oddfellowship. To encircle in one social band, the wives, daughters, widows of the Odd Fellowship and entwine around the mystic cord that each and all may be mutually benefited and more closely united in the noble work of relieving the needy, the sick and the distressed.”

To my knowledge, all these lodges are defunct.