Great Road Day: Mount Moriah Lodge & Valentine Whitman House

After stops at Hearthside House and Saylesville Meeting House during Great Road Day in September 2024, I visited two more historic buildings: Mount Moriah Lodge and Valentine Whitman House. The lodge is the meeting place of Masons in Lime Rock, a quarry village in Lincoln, while the house is a stone ender currently serving as a private residence. On a sunnier day, these would make a decent pair of quick history stops.

Mount Moriah Lodge was the eighth Masonic lodge established in Rhode Island. The new club opened in 1804 with twenty-three members. Originally, the Free and Accepted Masons would have met at St. Johns Lodge No. 1 in Cranston, Mt. Vernon Lodge No. 4 in North Kingstown, or the Grand Lodge in East Providence. The red brick Masonic lodge originally held the school on the first floor and the club on the second floor. This was evidently a common practice at the time, as Solomon’s Temple Lodge built in Uxbridge, MA in 1820 held Uxbridge Academy on the first floor and the club on the second floor. Inside the lodge were items common to most lodges in the United States, including a raised platform containing a podium for giving lectures and a pair of chairs for the leaders of the group, along with an alter holding religious texts in the middle of the floor.

Down the road was Valentine Whitman House, built in 1696 and currently in fantastic condition. I especially loved the dark blue paint contrasting the pale gray of the stone ender chimney. Unlike the pair of stone enders used as museums by Historic New England, Clemence-Irons House from 1691 and Eleazer Arnold House from 1693, the historic restoration non-profit Preserve Rhode Island has refurbished Whitman House house to become a liveable modern home. The organization received the building from the Town of Lincoln in 2021, as the town had rescued it in 1991 but not had the funding or knowledge to revamp the structure.

As for the original Valentine Whitman, this name belonged to a father and a son. The elder Valentine Whitman originally spelled his surname Wightman and learned an Algonquin language, allowing him to act as an interpreter between European colonists and local Native Americans. He fought in King Philip’s War, also called Metacomet’s War, and was acquainted with Roger Williams. The younger Valentine Whitman was apparently less exciting, as I could find little written about him besides the fact that he built a beautiful house.