Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON, THE ENGLISH SUPERINTENDENT OF INDIANS IN NEW YORK ; AND FIRST MASTER OF ST. PATRICK'S LODGE ON THE MOHAWK. Freemasonry has its traditions and historic allusions to lodges in New York, which are older than any of its authentic records in that colony. Like footprints on the shores of time, they seem to point to unrecorded dynasties of craftsmen, wl;ow labors, like those of thepioneer in some primeval forest, who erects the first rude habitation ill the place where busy cities afterwards arise, are all obliterated and forgotten. These traditions seem to point to the Palatines on the Hudson as the first mystic temple builders of New York. The Masonic annals of England then give us the names of Daniel Coxe, in 1730; Kichard Riggs, in 1737 ; Francis Goelet, in 1751, as each having authority to congregate the brethren and establish Masonic lodges in the province of New York. There is no recorded certainty that either of these, except Mr. Goelet, acted on their commissions, and the only record of his proceedings in his Provincial Grand-mastership that we have met with, is a newspaper account of that day, which states that on St. John the Evangelist's day, in 1753, when his successor, George Harrison, was installed in the city of New York, a Grand Lodge, which, had previously existed in the province, was convened on the occasion. George Harrison presided as Provincial Grand Master for eighteen years, and during that time he established lodges in the city of New- York, and others in towns upon the Hudson, where the population was numerous, and one in an infant settlement on the Mohawk. He also granted warrants in Connecticut, New Jersey, and at Detroit. The lodge which he chartered upon the Mohawk, was located at Caughnawaga. the residence of Sir William J...