Texas has changed quite a bit over the years, as is readily seen in our vast photograph collection. To help bring some of those changes to life, we’ve created a “Texas over Time” series of gifs that will illustrate the construction and renovations of buildings, changing aerial views, and more. Our collections are especially strong on Waco and Baylor images, but look for some views beyond the Heart of Texas, too.
Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas construction (8th Street side), 1948-1949
- The Waco Masonic Lodge, also known as The Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas, is the headquarters for the Texas Freemasons. It is located at 715 Columbus Avenue. The original headquarters were in Houston but were moved to Waco during the early 1900s.
- Many noted figures in Texas and Baylor history were freemasons, including Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, R.E.B. Baylor, George W. Truett, and many of Baylor’s presidents.
- The building is intended to be modeled after King Solomon’s temple.
Here’s a Flickr set of the images used to compiled this animation (plus a few more of the Masonic Grand Lodge), should you want to examine each individually. Most of the pictures are scanned from negatives in the Fred Marlar photographic collection. Enjoy!
Gif and factoids prepared by Timothy Brestowski, student library assistant
Amanda Pape
March 30, 2014 at 9:58 amCan you tell me what you used to create the animated GIFs? Thanks!
Amanda Norman
March 31, 2014 at 8:33 amOf course! We use Photoshop–we Googled for instructions on how to create animated GIFs and found this site to be especially helpful: http://www.briandalessandro.com/blog/create-an-animated-gif-in-photoshop-cs5/. If you don’t have access to Photoshop, it looks like there are plenty of GIF-making sites and instructions on the Web, too. Good luck!
Jodie Griffin
December 29, 2017 at 11:57 amThat was Cool! It was shared on the Texas Freemasons Facebook Page yesterday.