Miners, Mariners Masons by Roger Burt

Author:Roger Burt [Burt, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Freemasonry & Secret Societies
ISBN: 9781905816163
Google: UE3MvwEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:34:51+00:00

Table 10 The Declared Total Asset Value of Members of Nevada Lodge (Total Real and Personal Estate)

Year

No. of Members Declaring

$0

–

$999

$1,000

–

$4,999

$5,000

–

$9,999

$10,000

–

$14,999

$15,000

–

$19,999

$20,000

–

$29,999

$30,000

–

above

1860

27

4

13

5

1

2

1

1

1870

51

13

18

7

5

0

1

7

This last conclusion is supported by the personal and estate values declared by some members in the censuses of 1860 and 1870. Although the latter date is considerably beyond the early gold rush years it has been included to give some impression of the dynamic of asset acquisition that might be backward projected for the years before 1860. Thus Table 10 shows that the average asset value of members of the Lodge was growing quickly in the 1860s and that, even at the beginning of that decade, many Lodge members already had acquired significant personal wealth. Indeed, if these returns are compared with those calculated by Mann for the city as a whole they reveal that the Lodge, which had only 3% of the local male population, includes four of its twelve wealthiest citizens in 1860, assessed in terms of a declared asset value of more than $10,000. A similar relationship was maintained in 1870, when seven Lodge members were counted among an elite city group of twenty-one citizens declaring similar asset values.58 Identifying the richest members of the Lodge also underlines the hazards of social categorisation by occupation. In 1860 they included the expected banker and attorney but also two ‘miners’. Similarly, in 1870, three of the seven described themselves as a ‘miner’ with one of them, George Jacobs, declaring an asset value of $80,000. By contrast, in both years there were several ‘miners’ who declared their total net worth—real estate and personal estate—at $1,000 or less.

It is unclear how well Masonry served the foreign-born members of the Lodge. On the one hand it might be noted that in 1860 only two of the seventeen foreign-born members reported total assets in excess of $1,000 while by 1870 this number had increased to eleven out of thirty-four. However, only one of the original seventeen was still in the Lodge at the latter date, the rest having moved on. If they had all done as well as the single survivor—Charles Klingenspor, a miner from Germany—they would clearly have prospered. His declared assets had increased from nothing to over $2,000 during the intervening ten years.

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