‘Annual St. John’s/St. Alban’s gathering’

   

If you’re lucky, you look forward to all your Masonic gatherings. (The secret is to purge your calendar of events that don’t do “it” for you.) Saturday, the annual huddle of New Jersey research lodge guys happened at The Cranbury Inn, our usual haunt.

Invitations went out, but only four of us could make it for a square meal and brainy conversation. It’s our St. John Baptist Day Luncheon (I think of it as St. Alban’s Day Luncheon) for the stalwart supporters of New Jersey Lodge of Masonic Research and Education 1786. We went four hours, finally wrapping it up at five o’clock, as the dinner crowd began taking over the place.

The Cranbury Inn strives to display an adequate number of Washington portraits and firearms...

…and, in my opinion, they come fairly close.

Conversation ranged from lamenting the cancellation of this year’s John Skene Masonic Conference to upcoming conferences in California and Cambridge to the benefits of authors achieving a balance of historical overview and experiential knowledge of the Craft to the bizarre sexual content of a novel, supposedly based on the Hiramic Drama, penned recently by a New Jersey Mason. And a lot more. (Someone pitched the idea of Magpie Mason merch! So look for Magpie T-shirts, trucker hats, tote bags, pens, key rings, koozies, etc. in time for Christmas.)

Of itself, The Cranbury Inn says:

In the mid-1600s in the center of the colony of New Jersey by Cranberry Creek, a mill town began to develop along an old Indian trail that had widened into a road. This road connected the colonies and was becoming a main thoroughfare for colonial travelers. In 1697 Cranberry Towne received its charter from England. With increasing development, a need arose in central New Jersey for a place to eat and drink, get fresh horses, and spend the night; thus, in the mid-1700s (1750 and 1765) our taverns were built to meet these needs of the travelers passing through this area.

After the colonies declared their independence from the motherland, this business officially established itself in 1780. What is now The Cranbury Inn has been functioning as a place to eat and drink since the 1750s.

In the year 1800 Hannah Disbrow Dey & Peter Perrine were married in the Presbyterian Church across the street from The Cranbury Inn. Middlesex County Courthouse records tell us “they built as their home the house that is now The Cranbury Inn.” Their house was built across the front of our two original taverns built in 1750 and 1765, thus further developing and upgrading their business.

Rev. William S. Hall, their grandson-in-law, was a Quaker and a declared abolitionist, the time frame of which seems to coordinate well with the date the New Jersey state historian put on the conversion/remodeling of a flue space on the east wall of our oldest tavern. This converted flue space is an alleged slave hiding space from the days when what is now The Cranbury Inn was an alleged stop on the underground railroad...

Read more here.

It’s a lot of driving for all of us, but we really enjoy it. I wouldn’t mind if we added a St. Andrew or St. John Evangelist celebration.