Orangeism in Prince Edward Island

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, viewed from Southport across the harbour, circa 1910 — Charlottetown viewed from Southport, Prince Edward Island, circa 1910. The Loyal Orange Association established Boyne Lodge at Charlottetown in 1849, making it the island's founding lodge. Photograph by Wm. Notman and Son. McCord Stewart Museum, VIEW-4820 / Public domain.

The Loyal Orange Association arrived on Prince Edward Island in 1849 with the chartering of Boyne Lodge at Charlottetown under an artilleryman of the British garrison. The provincial grand lodge was instituted in 1862, and Boyne Lodge received provincial incorporation in 1892. This page traces the early institutional history.

The Loyal Orange Association reached Prince Edward Island in 1849, just under twenty years after the founding of the Canadian Order at Brockville. The first lodge on the Island was chartered under the authority of the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia and was formally confirmed by warrant from the Grand Lodge of British America in 1853. By the end of the 19th century the PEI jurisdiction had its own provincial grand lodge, a parliamentary act of incorporation for its senior lodge, and a cluster of about a dozen primary lodges scattered along the Island’s north- and south-shore settlement belts.

Boyne Lodge

Boyne Lodge was constituted at Charlottetown in 1849, meeting in the old Masonic hall above Reddin’s drugstore at Sunnyside. Its first Worshipful Master was a Mr. Blackwood, an artilleryman of the British contingent then garrisoned at the city’s Fort Edward. The chartering warrant originally came through the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia. Warrant 614 was issued by the Grand Lodge of British America, dated 12 February 1853, regularising the Island lodge under the senior Canadian authority.

Boyne Lodge received its own Act of Incorporation from the Prince Edward Island Legislature in 1892. That statute is the earliest provincial-level legal recognition of an Orange body on the Island.

The 1859 Scarlet warrant

The first Scarlet warrant for a Royal Arch Purple degree body on the Island was granted on 24 July 1859. At that date the Association had four primary lodges on the Island.

Instituting the Grand Lodge of Prince Edward Island, 1862

At its Cobourg session of 9 August 1859, the Grand Lodge of British North America resolved that there would be separate local or provincial grand lodges under the general authority of the senior Grand Lodge, and specifically that the Island would constitute a distinct province under that arrangement.

Province House, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island -- the birthplace of Canadian Confederation, a neoclassical sandstone building on Richmond Street — Province House, Charlottetown -- seat of the PEI Legislature that granted Boyne Lodge its Act of Incorporation in 1892, the earliest provincial-level legal recognition of an Orange body on the Island. Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Under that resolution, Deputy Grand Master George P. Tanton summoned the Worshipful Masters of the Island's primary lodges to Charlottetown. They convened in the Orange Hall on 24 February 1862 to institute the Provincial Grand Lodge of Prince Edward Island.

The founding meeting included the Worshipful Masters or representatives of Boyne Lodge (Dr. Thomas Leeming, acting Provincial Grand Secretary), Prince Edward Lodge (Nathaniel Acorn and Richard Smith), Rose Lodge (George Stanley), Lyone Lodge (David Ross), Trinity Lodge (Dr. D. Kaye), Barton Lodge (John Robertson), Tanton Lodge (Thomas Carson), Calvin Lodge (Thomas Bigger), and Dalmeney Lodge (Roderick McNeil), together with visitors from other lodges.

The authorising warrant itself carried the date of 26 July 1861, issued under the seal of the senior Canadian office — the Grand Master of British North America acting for the LOABA. Its terms gave the new Island Grand Lodge the right to elect officers, raise dues, subdivide the Island into counties and districts, and pass its own rules — subject always to the constitution of the senior grand lodge.

Context

The 1830s and 1840s saw the largest cohort of Irish Protestant emigration to the Maritime provinces since Loyalist times.

An Orangemen's parade procession in Canada, 1907, showing marchers in ranks with Orange Order banners on a city street — An Orange Order parade, 1907 -- the public expression of the fraternal network the Ulster settlers brought with them to Prince Edward Island when they arrived in the 1840s. Library and Archives Canada / Public domain

The shore settlements of the Island — notably Wood Islands, Murray Harbour, and the Cornwall-Charlottetown belt — took in Ulster settlers whose existing Orange affiliations carried straight across. The 1849 chartering of Boyne Lodge gave those settlers an institutional home, and the 1862 provincial grand lodge put the Island's Orangeism on the same organisational footing as the mainland Canadian jurisdictions. Wood Islands and the south shore remained one of the heavier concentrations of rural PEI lodges into the early 20th century.

Decline and the present

The Island’s Orange membership declined through the 20th century along the same curve as mainland Canadian jurisdictions, and for the same combination of reasons: the post-1920 slowdown in Ulster emigration, mid-century secularisation of Maritime Protestantism, and the disappearance of sectarian politics from Island public life. A small number of PEI lodges continue to meet. The Public Archives of the Island holds the minute books, warrants, and officers’ correspondence of the jurisdiction going back to 1849.

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Sources

'An Act to Incorporate the Boyne Lodge No. 1 of the Loyal Orange Association of Prince Edward Island', Statutes of Prince Edward Island, 1892 — The incorporating statute; original session volume held by the Public Archives and Records Office of PEI.
Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward Island — Loyal Orange Association of PEI fonds — Warrants, minute books, and grand-lodge correspondence for the PEI jurisdiction.
Grand Lodge of British America — Report of Proceedings, 1859 session (Cobourg) — Records the August 1859 resolution authorising separate provincial grand lodges, under which PEI constituted as its own province.
Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 1980. — Situates the PEI jurisdiction within the wider Maritime expansion of the Order.