How Many Masonic Temples Are In The USA? Apparently - Nobody Knows!

While you may be able to get an answer from google about the total membership of the largest and most infamous secret society in America - which is coincidentally 2 million - You might have a much more difficult time trying to figure out how many Masonic Temples are in America.

Now first of all, it's very difficult to know whether 2 million is an accurate number or not, especially when we look at the ideas I will be discussing in a moment. But some quick math: google also tells us that there are roughly 151 million men in the US, and we know that while women are not strictly forbidden to be Masons, they are certainly a rarity. So we will do some slight rounding here and conclude that - 1.31% of all American men are Freemasons. So even if the numbers about membership are accurate, we can safely say that out of a sampling of random American men- at least 1 out of 100 is going to be a Freemason.
Not exactly the tiny organization that many people presume it to be.

Image of Nob Hill Grand Masonic Hall in San Francisco

So - How Many Masonic Temples Are In The US?

Well, I did a google search on this and expected to get a comprehensive list right away - especially seeing how many people are curious about what the Freemasons might be up to. The surprising thing was- I could not find such a list. I did find the wikipedia page :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Masonic_buildings_in_the_United_States
However, this list is incomplete by any measure. For example- in the State of Hawaii we get the message : No current Masonic building are landmarked. That's interesting because I used to live a stone's throw away from this place:

Interestingly enough, this is just one of many Masonic Lodges I know of in Hawaii.
So lets do a quick comparison of what wikipedia tells us, and what google maps tells us.

Let's start at the top - with Alabama - Wikipedia tells us there is one lodge in the state: Helion Lodge in Huntsville, Alabama. Now lets look at what a search for Masonic brings up in the Birmingham area:

So there seems to be 8 Freemasonic temples just in the Birmingham area alone.

A picture from one of the Birmingham lodges.

Very interesting. Let's move down the list. Next up is Alaska, and once again wikipedia tells us : No current Masonic building are landmarked. Lets compare this to google maps:
Once again, quite interesting: We see nine results for google maps just in the Anchorage area. And look at this Grand Hall in Fairbanks, and, amazingly this image is from the Wikipedia page about this particular Grand Lodge!

Grand Hall in Fairbanks

Now lets jump to California, with the largest entry on Wikipedia at 22 lodges! Again, we compare to google maps:

We can see that there are at least 20 Freemason Temples in The Los Angeles area alone!
All of this was very surprising to me, it seems that even in the information age, the basic facts about how many Freemason temples there are in America will turn up very few results. Which of course brings up the question - if we are so unsure about how many meeting places the Freemasons have, how can we at all be sure about their membership.

That is all for this blog. If you found it informative, please comment below, follow, and I will see you on the next post.