Nursing Home's Demise Closes a Chapter on History
Deemed Too Costly, Frederick Facility Evokes Simpler Era

washingtonpost.com

By David Snyder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page C05

The late-morning routine at the Maryland Odd Fellows Home went on as usual last week, though the grand old manse in Frederick is in the final stretch of nearly 80 years of service. Lunch was served. Bingo was played. And Bob Barker smiled brightly, as always, on the community-room television.

But for the elderly people who call the place home, those small habits offered little comfort, because they soon will end.

"I planned to spend the rest of my life here," said Charles Davis, 87, a retired printer with bright blue eyes and a thatch of white hair. "I'm sorry to see it go."

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows said last week that it will close the assisted-living facility by Aug. 1, ending the local landmark's 78 years of operation. The group said it may offer the building for rent. The latest in a series of once-robust Frederick institutions to fade in the face of the area's changing economy and demographics, the Odd Fellows Home is an imposing physical reminder of what many remember as a simpler time.

With its slate roof and battlement-thick red brick walls, the building also evokes a less-efficient and slower time -- a period out of which Frederick County has raced, with new construction, new roads, new people.

Officials of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, an international fraternal organization, said costs were too high for the assisted-living facility to continue operating. Since several new nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in the area offer similar services, most with more modern accommodations, the not-for-profit Odd
Fellows Home was finding it harder to compete, said Robert Beatty, grand secretary of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of Maryland.

"It's held its own for a while here," he said. "But with the rise in insurance costs, especially for nonprofits, it was getting harder and harder to keep it up."

When the home opened in 1925, the Odd Fellows were an important part of the city's social fabric. Like the hundreds of Odd Fellows chapters around the country, the Frederick lodge was host to community and political events and was one of the area's few venues for entertainment -- dances, music, performances.

At a grand-opening gala for the nursing home and orphanage that year, Gov. Albert C. Ritchie spoke at the ceremony, and the roads heading to the new complex, north of downtown Frederick, were packed with about 2,500 attendees, local historian John Ashbury said.

"You have to remember that in those days, there wasn't much else to do," Ashbury said. "Radio was relatively new in '25. Of course, TV was a quarter-century away. And Frederick had several movie houses, but they were still showing silent movies. If the guy was sick who played the organ, there wasn't anything to see," Ashbury said.

Nearly 80 years later, interest in the Odd Fellows chapter has waned and its membership has declined, meaning fewer people are available to raise funds to keep the home open.

Frederick County's population boom -- a 30 percent increase in the 1990s, to 195,277 residents -- has brought about a cultural shift that is moving the county away from its agricultural, small-town roots. In 2001, the area's last livestock auction closed. Several shooting ranges have moved farther into the countryside because of new
residential developments. Volunteer firehouses are struggling to find members.

"It's a struggle to get young parents involved" in civic organizations, said Manfred Bangert, sovereign grand secretary of the Odd Fellows's national headquarters in Winston-Salem, N.C. "Either he's too busy, or she's too busy. . . Their children are involved in baseball or karate or what-have-you, and the parents' time is just
taken up."

Once common in small towns and cities around the country, Odd Fellows lodges, with their distinctive "I.O.O.F" signs, now elicit more curious glances than interest in joining.

"We get a lot of questions about the name," said Pam Johnson, manager of the Frederick Odd Fellows Home. "A lot of people don't know what it is."

The group was founded in England in the 18th century by working-class men who wanted to provide a sort of social-service network in an era when government and businesses did not. The group's central mission remains "to visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan." When the group began, its
orphanages, nursing homes and cemeteries were exclusively for Odd Fellows. Most lodges have since offered their services to non-members, for a price.

Although Odd Fellows officials say the name's origin is unclear, it appears to derive from English life at the time of the group's founding, when members of the upper classes deemed it odd for working-class people to band together for a common good.

Frederick's chapter, called the King David Lodge, was founded Jan. 11, 1898, and has 30 members, down from about 200 in the group's heyday 60 years ago. Nationally, the group has gone from a peak of more than 1 million members to about 120,000 today, Bangert said.

In Frederick, the Maryland Odd Fellows Home includes three large buildings. One was an orphanage, one is the Odd Fellows Home and the third was the lodge's central gathering building. For years, the Odd Fellows have rented two of the buildings to a private elementary and a middle school. The assisted-living home is the
last vestige of direct Odd Fellows involvement in the structures built by the organization.

"There's no way you can replace this," said Marshall Botkin, an official of the King David Lodge. "There's something very nurturing about this place, and that will be lost."

The three-story structure is creaky and musty. It is shadowy in places, bright in others. Large windows dominate the bottom-floor sunroom, where residents spend many of their waking hours. The central lobby area, which resembles an outsized foyer in an antebellum Southern mansion, opens to the dining room on the left and the sunroom straight ahead. A board staircase leads to rooms on the second floor. Paint is peeling in a few places and some windows are rippled with age.

In the basement, where the Odd Fellows still meet, there is a warren of empty offices. The group's 1898 charter, filled with spidery and fading signatures, hangs inconspicuously on a brick wall, its frame dusty and the glass cracked. Hidden within the walls, its location known only to members, is a skeleton used in the group's secret initiation ceremony.

A year ago, the home had about 34 residents. More than half have moved out, all but one to other nursing or assisted-living homes. The 13 remaining residents will be gone soon.

Davis, the retired printer, is scheduled to leave tomorrow morning for another facility. An Odd Fellow since 1978, he came to the Frederick home a little more than a year ago after living with his son in western Maryland. Born and raised in Catonsville, Md., he lived in the same house, built by his father, for 82 years, he said. He
quickly grew to love the Odd Fellows Home, he said, and he disagrees with the decision to shut it down.

"It's upset me quite a bit, and it's upset a lot of these people," Davis said as he sat, metal cane at his side, in the home's sunroom. The game show "The Price Is Right" blared on a nearby television. "It's more of a home atmosphere than I think you would find anywhere else. I'm sorry that this place is closing."