Build It And They Will Come

Build It And They Will Come. Battleground to Community. , In 1818 the Private Rockville and Washington Turnpike Co. began building a road to link Washington City to Rockville, Maryland. This road helped create a village. A toll gate on what today is Georgia Avenue between Quackenbos and Rittenhouse streets encouraged travelers to pause here. Lewis Burnett built a roadhouse, or restaurant, just across Missouri Avenue to your left. By the early 1860s the roadhouse became Moreland Tavern, offering sleeping accommodations. During the Civil War, the tavern housed the officers who would lead the defense of nearby Fort Stevens during the Confederate attack., The tavern made way for the wood frame home of Stansbury Masonic Lodge No. 24. The hall, in addition to meeting and secret ceremonial spaces, included the income producing Brightwood Hotel. The Freemasons are an ancient fraternal organization with roots in the building trades. Members continue to do good works and create fellowship. Washington’s Freemasons served in all professions, from bricklayer to president., In 1919 Stansbury Lodge member Frank Russell White designed a grand new limestone temple. Its main meeting room could hold 200 and had a mezzanine and balcony with a pipe organ. The first floor initially housed a post office, then a Sanitary (later Safeway) Grocery and eventually a Pontiac car dealership., The Freemasons rented meeting spaces to a Greek Sunday school, high school fraternities, synagogues and others. After Stansbury Lodge moved to Takoma in 1987, the neoclassical building was sold. In the 1990s. it gained brief notoriety as a nightclub. In 2007 it reopened as the Lofts at Brightwood.