Past Master David Forsyth was on the hall association when the pipe burst in 2013. It wasn’t until he made his way through the mounds of accumulated history that he realized the enormity of what had nearly been lost. “I was horrified. None of us understood how much we actually had,” Forsyth says. “After the initial horror wore off, I realized all of this stuff had to be moved.”

This discovery was the beginning of a project that has since taken on a life of its own. Over the next several months, Forsyth moved the material out of the damp room and into the lodge’s spacious dining room where he could get a better sense of what he was dealing with. “I really had no idea what I would find,” he recalls. But he soon discovered that within the boxes and heaps of books was a veritable menagerie of historic gems. From bits of stone recovered from Jerusalem and cornerstones of long-since demolished local landmarks to historical records of the Oakland area and framed Ansel Adams photographs, the lodge had been sitting atop the type of archives most historians only dream about.

The bound minute books and lodge records from the three lodges that today make up Oakland Durant Rockridge Lodge present a fascinating glimpse into the notable members of Oakland’s past. Oakland Lodge No. 188 was the first of these lodges, founded in 1868 and headed by none other than Nathan W. Spaulding, a multiyear mayor of Oakland and assistant United States treasurer of San Francisco – a position to which he was appointed by President James A. Garfield, an Ohio Mason. The leaders of the two other foundational lodges, Durant Lodge No. 268 and Rockridge odge No. 468, also played pivotal roles in local and state affairs. Henry Durant, for instance, was the founding president of the University of California system. Many members of Rockridge Lodge numbered among the city’s police and fire departments. And here, in their boxes and books and ephemera gathered over decades, Oakland Durant Rockridge odge has the physical connection to these great men.

Many of these men left their mark upon Oakland, and in the several months it took Forsyth to organize their archival materials, he began to feel uniquely connected to them. “When you open a book and read something in the vernacular of that time and place, your eyes kind of get watery,” he says. “Here were men who were leaders of the city; who had the capacity to make things happen.” But, these men were not only important historical figures in their own right: They were Masons, uniquely and inextricably linked to the spirit of the lodge that remains to this day. “These are our forefathers. Theirs are the shoulders we stand upon today,” Forsyth says.