Elizabeth Hall
A Walk Through History
The Independent Order of Odd Fellows is a non-political, non-sectarian international fraternal order of Odd Fellowship.
It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Wildey in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The first Odd Fellow ledge was instituted in Canada on Aug. 10, 1843, twenty-four years after the birth of the American Order in Baltimore. The first Odd Fellow lodge in Canada was Prince of Wales Lodge No. 1 in Montreal. The first Lodge in Ontario was instituted on June 17, 1845, it was called Victoria Lodge No. 6 and was located in the village of Belleville. Victoria Lodge was the first lodge in Ontario, but the sixth in Canada; lodges were numbered in the order in which they were created (the location of the lodge in the country didn’t matter).
The Odd Fellows Hall in Napanee was built in 1886 after a fire in the downtown district destroyed multiple buildings in the years prior. The building was designed by Fred Bartlett in a Renaissance Revival Style (buildings taking inspiration from classic Italian models) for a man named Archibald Thomas Harshaw.
Before the fire that destroyed the businesses, Hinch & Co. sold dry goods in this location, and H.W Perry and John Jacob Perry, a druggist, conducted business there. In 1887 Lahey and McKenty ran a dry goods business on the main floor, and the Napanee Public Library (first named the Napanee Mechanics Institute) housed their library there. The Independent Order of Odd Fellow (Abbreviated: I.O.O.F) rented the third floor.
The I.O.O.F was known as a Freemasons fellowship (Freemasonry: an organization that believes in brotherhood and helping others), they believed in friendship, love and truth. The lodge in this location was active until 1939.
Random History Fact: Women who owned cats during the spread of the Black Plague were accused of being witches; the Black Plague spread through rodents like rats and mice, the women’s cats killed those rodents, leaving the women as the only ones free of the disease.