The Connersville Loyal Order of Moose Lodge 1160, located on Eastern Avenue, which will now sit empty after members of the organization voted last week to forfeit its charter. It is now the second local fraternal organization within a year – the Elks being the other — which have closed their doors.(JAMES SPRAGUE/News-Examiner)
A long-time Connersville fraternal organization has called it quits.
The Connersville Loyal Order of Moose Lodge 1160, a staple in the community for more than a century, has officially closed its doors as members voted unanimously Jan. 25 to forfeit the lodge's charter with Moose International.
The Loyal Order of Moose is a fraternal and service organization founded in Louisville, Ky., in 1888, with the Connersville lodge having been established in the early 1900s.
According to Paul Lynn, lodge administrator and bar manager, the organization couldn't stay afloat any longer due to its financial overhead, declining revenue and declining membership.
It marks the second fraternal organization in Connersville within the past year — the Connersville Elks #521 voluntarily surrendered their Elks charter in May 2013 — to shutter its doors.
"With us being a private, fraternal organization, our only customers were our members. We're not open to the public, you just can't walk in off the street," Lynn said. "Our membership had declined over the years and if they're not coming in on a daily or weekly basis, spending money ... the overhead got to be so much it wasn't feasible to keep the doors open."
Membership in 2013 had dwindled below 300 members at the Connersville lodge, according to Lynn, a drastic decrease from years past.
"We were down to about 278 members," he said. "Back in the '70s, we had 1,400-plus."
Other financial commitments, such as to the organization's Mooseheart and Moosehaven communities — located in Mooseheart, Ill., and Jacksonville, Fla. — which serve children, teens and seniors in need, also played a role in the lodge's closure.
"We have a lot of obligations also, to Mooseheart and Moosehaven," Lynn said. "We've got obligations we have to reach monthly and we weren't even able to attain those."
The vote by members to close the lodge was a tough, but necessary one, said Lynn, a member of the Moose for more than 20 years.
"It was sickening. It broke my heart," he said of having to close the lodge. "All in all, though, it was only good business. We couldn't go on any farther, we were so far in debt."
The closing of the Loyal Order of Moose Lodge 1160 is just a microcosm of what is occurring with other fraternal organizations nationwide, which face a situation of aging membership and not enough interest from younger people.
The Moose, for example, have seen their numbers decrease from more than 4,000 lodges and 1.3 million members worldwide in 1979 to roughly 1,800 lodges and 800,000 members in 2013, according to Moose International.
"It's nationwide. New Castle just lost their Moose. The lodge in New Castle closed up three months ago. It's nationwide. It's just not the fraternal organizations, it's the service organizations. They're struggling, too," Lynn said. "It seems to be a generational thing, too. The younger people nowadays, the 20- and 30-year-olds, they're not really into going to a club and (socializing), like in the '70s and '80s ... they don't do that. They've got social media. They get on their Facebook and stuff like that. It seems to be a generational thing, to me."
Current Moose members will have their membership transferred from the Connersville lodge to the Loyal Order of Moose general assembly, according to Lynn, then will have an option to choose another lodge to become a member of.
As far as the lodge building, located at 832 N. Eastern Ave., it will be returned to the mortgage company it belongs to, with an auction of the lodge's contents to take place in the near future, Lynn said.
"We had a mortgage on it, so it will go to the mortgage company," Lynn said. "They'll be an auction to sell off all the contents inside the building."
Despite the unanimous vote, Lynn still wonders if the lodge could have been saved, had it been proactive in addressing some of its membership and financial issues before they became too hard to handle.
"Of course, hindsight's 20/20," he said. "We needed to be more forward-thinking, more progressive, try to get the membership enlarged to where we could have been self-sufficient ... I'm at a loss for words. It broke my heart."
Lynn can't rule out the possibility, however, that the Moose could re-open a lodge in Connersville in the future.
"We have to wait a minimum of five years," Lynn said. "Maybe we can open it up again, in a smaller building or something, but we're all going to try to keep in touch with each other. Most of us are members at the other organizations, also.
"Maybe in five years, we can find a building we can rent, get another charter and try to do it again."
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