1859 Masonic Lodge & General Store

This building served as a lodge, general store, and post office from 1859 until the 1950s, and today serves as the Port Royal State Park Headquarters. Its lower floor had two rooms, with the larger used as the general store and the smaller as the post office and later a telephone exchange, while the upper floor was the meeting space of the Free and Accepted Masons, Hampton Lodge No. 137, established in 1858. Hampton Lodge No. 137 remained at Port Royal until 1921, when it consolidated with Red River Lodge No. 537 in Adams, Tennessee. The building is the only remaining structure from the town of Port Royal, which began a slow decline at the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction until the town faded away, while this building remained in continuous use as a store until the 1950s. In 1863, on a Sunday morning, George Whitehead shot and killed Simpson Rosson, both members of the lodge; Whitehead was arrested, tried under military law with at least part of the trial taking place on the upper floor, convicted, and sentenced to death. It was supposed that a relative of Whitehead's made a deal with the Defender, General John Garner, in the back room of the building to pay three thousand dollars to cross enemy lines and obtain President Lincoln's pardon, and Whitehead is thought to have received that pardon. In 1903, during construction of a bridge over Red River, seventeen-year-old Willie Wooldridge and two other men remained on the bridge as supports were removed, and when the bridge collapsed Wooldridge was critically injured, taken to the lodge's upper floor for treatment, and soon died; his mother arrived shortly after his death, was overcome with grief, and also died there. A tornado struck the building in 1921 and removed part of the upper floor, after which the roof height was adjusted instead of rebuilding that section. After the State of Tennessee acquired the abandoned and badly deteriorated building, it was renovated for use as the park headquarters, and efforts to restore it to a late nineteenth-century appearance began in 2011.

Tennessee · United States