Locating US Free Masons: What the Results Say

How do you study the Freemasons? Well, you can search for their culture, their secrets, or you can examine how they fall on a map. And the Internet can help us do that.

A search for ‘freemasons’ on a US map search site reveals most of the activity on the northeast side, where the English first settled, the states of Vancouver, Connecticut, Indianapolis, Massachusetts and the state of New York. The only state listed on the west side is California.

A search of Washington reveals the House of the Temple or the Supreme Council twice. Mostly what comes up are various lodges around DC.

In New York, hostels are quite scarce and are further apart in central Jersey City. Zooming out, we find attention turned to the lodges in Connecticut and Washington; New York lodges are probably quite small. Zooming out even further, we discover that there is a lodge of Chinese Freemasons in Montreal. The center now appears to be in Massachusetts; maybe they have a lot of smaller lodges, so the results don’t show right away. And if we zoom out as far as we can, we can see that the only places that really matter are London and the East Side of the United States.

When you compare it to another country to which mainly British emigrated, Australia, we find that freemasonry seems to be found in almost every city in Australia, so it spread much further than the US.

Strangely, the term ‘Masonic ritual’ is more widespread, as if the legend of Freemasonry is greater than its practice. We have new references in Colorado, Oklahoma and Ohio. The area around Florida appears to be empty of Masons, as are Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. The search term ‘masonic conspiracy’ seems to center on Ohio, oddly around a slot machine with the same name, so perhaps the legend has outpaced the facts.