Chartered in 1798, Washington Lodge No. 3 was the first Masonic lodge chartered in Rhode Island, is now the second oldest continuously used Masonic Lodge in America, and is the oldest public building in Warren. Of its 58 original members, 21 were sea captains. Completed in 1799, the lodge was crafted by local shipwrights using oak timbers salvaged from the British stone fleet sunk across Newport Harbor in 1778; Brother Sylvester Child purchased the old ships and floated the timbers up Narragansett Bay and into the Warren River to his shipyard at the foot of Baker and Miller Streets. The building was a massive undertaking for its time, designed with fine federal-style features and richly adorned with classic elements of the period. The Great Hall's arched ceiling was made from beams of a British ship, and its walls are painted with exceptional Egyptian-themed murals. The lodge's first floor served public purposes, housing the Town Clerk's office from 1800 to the late 1800's and a school for women possibly associated with Brown University in the early 1900's. In 1915, members commissioned artist Max Mueller to design the lodge room, drawing on the Book of the Dead and the Papyrus of Ani from the Boston Public Library to select images believed to have Masonic symbolism; Egyptian-themed fresco murals were painted around the Great Hall to tell a story of human construction, and these murals were restored in 2016.