It's not too soon to start planning  your historic personality!

This fundraiser was so popular last year, with its food, live music and prize for best historic costume - and what unique and wonderful costumes people came up with! 

Count Liberace filled in with the band on the Elk’s beautiful grand piano!

A word about the Elks...

Our partnership with the Elks is an exciting one and we hope to work together again next year!  Merrymaking with the DCHS and the Elks provided a rare chance to view the first floor of one of Superior’s beautiful historic buildings, the Masonic Temple, now home of the Elk’s Club.  Halloween is an ideal time to tell ghost stories, and Elk members relayed accounts of hearing noises on the second floor but upon investigation, find nothing but the smell of cigar smoke.  Indeed, well-known Masons such as H.H. Grace, Martin Pattison and W.H. Webb convened in the likely, smoke-filled parlor for social and business gatherings. Funeral services were held in this room in 1934 for frontier photographer, David Barry.

The Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks of the USA has an impressive history as well.  Charter members of Superior-403 in 1898, to name a few, were J.J. Fisher, K.W. McLaggan, Solon L. Perrin and John A. Murphy.  Superior is unique in that it is the only Wisconsin lodge, with the exception of Milwaukee, that was not sponsored by another Wisconsin lodge.  The order held its meetings in several locations in Superior until 1911, when the Elks built a new building on the corner of 11^th Street and Ogden.  As often was the case, they lost their beautiful building to fire in 1983 and moved to their present location on Hughitt and Belknap.

Looking back quite a bit further, the Elks’ origins go back to 1867, when a young variety singer from England named Charles Vivian arrived in New York and quickly made friends with other theatre folk in the local pubs.  According to the website of Elks Lodge 944 in Ashland, Oregon, Vivian met a musician named Dick Steirly after a matinee one day and invited him to meet his friends at Sandy Spencer’s place at Broadway and Fulton Street.  Included in this group were performers, Hughey Dougherty, Cool Burgess and Henry Vandemark, who suggested a game of dice.  Vivian suggested he teach them a game of his own instead.  Calling to the bartender, he asked for three wine corks, two of which he gave to Steirly and Vandemark.  Asking Burgess to be a judge, he asked Dougherty to count to three, at which point, the three men would pick up his cork and lay it back down again.  The last man to set his cork down had to buy a round of drinks.  As Steirly had already been told how the game worked, he and Vivian merely held their hand briefly over their cork, while Vandemark actually picked up the cork and put it down.  He was stuck with the tab.

This event led to the idea of forming a club, where the perspective member who wanted to join the “Corks,” would pay a fee of fifty cents to Vivian, the “Imperial Cork,” and those of the club would always carry their wine cork in their pocket.  If he was ever caught without his cork, his penalty was to buy the drinks.  An actor by the name of George McDonald thought the joke funny and dubbed the group, “The Jolly Corks.”  In December, 1868, gathering at Spencer’s after a funeral of a fellow performer, McDonald suggested they evolve into a benevolent and fraternal society and they changed their name from the “Jolly Corks” to the “Elks.”

 While celebrating Halloween at the beautiful Masonic Temple, raise a toast to Charles Vivian and his fellow Jolly Corks and ask an Elk member how you can become a member of this organization, which remains a benevolent and generous society.