Lodge 605 Building History
Creston Lodge 605 was organized June 27, 1900. The first Exalted Ruler was J. B. Sullivan.
From the incipiency of the order the lodge was growing and prospering until on June 24, 1907 the present home, one of the finest in the state, was dedicated. It was built under the supervision of the building committee John Hackett, Chm., Dr J. W. Reynolds, D. W. Higbee, C. A. Neimeyer, H. D. Smith, G. W. Fogg, and J. C. Sullivan. The elegant structure with the grounds it occupies cost the lodge $35,000.00 and was practically paid for.
The lodge takes pride of the fact that the entire structure including decorations and fixtures were done by member of the lodge.
The new building is a massive structure, built of hard brick and said to be the most substantially built eclifice in the city. It is forty eight feet by seventy two feet six inches. The west half of the basement contains a bowling alley. The east half, the furnace, etc. and a large dining room.
On the first floor is a hall, reception room, check room, billiard room, card and reading room and buffet.
On the second floor is a hall, property rooms, musicians gallery and a lodge room. The floor is a polished hard maple.
The interior decorations are a feature of this building and commands you attention as soon as you enter. You feel the power of the mind over matter for the pigments of color, crude in the original, by clever blending and distribution intermingled with artistic designing produces a beautiful whole, restful to the eye and pleasing to the mind. In the hall the colors are cardinal muresco, deep milory green and gold. The designs are classic Greek.
There is a billiard hall and general assembly or sitting room and is called the Flemish room.
The two rooms right and left of the main entrance used as a reception room are decorated in a unique style, in gobelin green and gold.
On the second floor is a number of minor rooms neatly tinted but it is when you enter the grand assembly hall on this floor that you see the full force of the decorators art.
The style of decorations in the Lodge room belong to no certain period entirely new in style and design from the brush of Louis Syberkrop. Here the artist, with no other material than color and brush has produced an architectual effect so deceiving to the eye that you must be told before you will believe that the massive columns, the heavy moldings, the recessed in the wall, the beautiful Parisian drapery, carelessly draped over a rod and the lifelike Elks head adjusted in the center, is simply imagination and conjury produced by color and brush. Above all in written in rich gold letters the Elks motto, The faults of our Brothers we write upon the sand, their virtues on the tablets of love and memory.
No pains or expense has been spared in furnishing all the rooms with all the requisites for comfort and amusement.
The above information was taken from the book "History of Union County" from the earliest historic times to 1908.