The Magazine Antiques

Iconography of the Odd Fellows

For several years now objects associated with American fraternal organizations, especially the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, have been turning up with increasing regularity among collectors of folk art like the couple featured here. The allure of these pieces is as bold as information about who made them and when is scarce. Perhaps a scholar will eventually dig through the records of a few of the hundreds of lodges (many of them now disbanded) and retrieve a part of this information, but the results of that detective work may not tell us much beyond the obvious facts: some of these pieces were handmade by a member of the lodge; some were manufactured by one of the regalia companies that grew up to satisfy a growing demand for ritualistic objects from fraternal organizations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and still others were probably made by hand and sold by regalia companies.

In the meantime, there are the artifacts—staffs, quilts, doorstops, signs, frames, and so forth—with their bold graphics and whiff of secrecy. The Odd Fellows symbols are not, in fact, all that mysterious: the heart-in-hand represents the charity and love that is at the core of a lodge’s mission to protect its members in illness, injury, or death. And so forth through the three interlocking rings (friendship, love, truth), the shepherd’s crook, the bundle of rods, the hourglass—all time-worn symbols easily decoded with a little help from online sources. It is the spirit of these objects that exerts their pull on collectors, and it is the individual character of a piece that separates it from its lesser counterparts. As with much folk art, value resides not in provenance but in individual artistry, in separating the exceptional from the routine.

The Freemasons may be the august paradigm of fraternal organizations with members among the founding fathers and a refined material culture that excites conspiracy theories and best-selling novels, but it was the more egalitarian Odd Fellows that yielded objects made by men and women that, at their best, seem to bubble up from a vanished popular culture. Tim Hill of the Hill Gallery in Michigan has been buying such pieces since the 1970s when many lodges had already disbanded. He looks for variations on a known theme that exhibit an idiosyncratic vision, and he points to the goat pictured here as an exceptional example of well-made folk art goatiness. Such goats are associated with rituals in which blindfolded initiates were wheeled around on them, but they were not part of sanctioned lodge practice according to Aimee Newell of the National Heritage Museum. Nevertheless they were prevalent and turn up frequently in old regalia catalogues and recent antiques shows. This one wins best in breed.

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