Following a deadly fire that destroyed Wichita’s original Kansas Masonic Home in 1916, the Freemasons of Kansas were determined to erect a new set of buildings that wouldn’t burn.
A 1916 Wichita Beacon article quoted one Mason as saying the new home, for elderly Masons and orphaned children, “will be here for centuries to come and we are not going to build any makeshift or temporary thing.”
However, just over a century later, the main building that most Wichitans have thought of as the Masonic Home — a Spanish-style 1917 building along Seneca between Maple and University — may be demolished…