The order
The Independent Order of Odd Fellows came to America on April 26, 1819, when Thomas Wildey, who had been an Odd Fellow in England before he crossed, founded Washington Lodge No. 1 with a few associates at the Seven Stars Tavern in Baltimore. The idea traveled. By the 1890s the Odd Fellows were the largest fraternal order in the country, larger even than the Masons, with halls in cities, mill towns and mountain villages.
The usual story behind the name is that in eighteenth-century England it was odd to find working people banded together to help one another. The order took the joke and kept it. Its members still recite a short list of duties: visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan.
Before health insurance and before most of the safety net, that was the arrangement. You paid your dues and came to the meetings. When the bad winter came, the lodge came to you.
The village
Hunter started as a tannery. In 1817, Colonel William Edwards moved up into the mountains and built one, and the settlement around it was first called Edwardsville. The tannery cured hides with bark stripped from the hemlocks on the slopes and sent some ten thousand sides of sole leather a year down to New York. When the hemlock forests were used up, the tanning went with them.
The railroad brought the boarders next, in the late nineteenth century, and the skiers came after them. The village was incorporated as Hunter in 1896. Its Main Street is Route 23A, and today the ski resort on Hunter Mountain is the largest employer in the village. Every era built something along that street.
The hall
The Odd Fellows built a hall. Hunter's lodge met on Main Street, in a Queen Anne building that still stands.
Lodges thinned out across the country after the Second World War, as employers and the government took on most of what a lodge used to promise. The buildings outlasted the meetings. When Chronogram came through Hunter in February of 2022, the old hall had been renovated and had a new tenant at the counter.
The counter
Fellow is run by Escape Hospitality, the group behind Scribner's Catskill Lodge just up the mountain. It opens at 8 and closes at 3, every day. The coffee is from Peaks.
That winter Chronogram's headline promised "the best dang egg sandwich this side of the Mississippi." We've never had a reason to argue.
Then there are the cinnamon rolls. You can order them by the dozen, which is the easy part. Getting one after eleven is the hard part. In our experience, by then they're gone.
The line
We've stood in Fellow's line more mornings than we'd like to admit. In winter it's ski boots and helmet hair. In the fall it's hiking boots and trail maps. On a weekday it's mostly the people who live up here, which is how you know a place is good.
Nobody in that line is a member of anything. A room that once opened for members now opens for anyone who walks in at eight.
The case
The Odd Fellows built halls because a town needs a place where people show up for one another. The promises are smaller now. Nobody at Fellow is going to bury you. But a warm room, a good cup of coffee and the same faces at the same hour every morning are a version of the old arrangement, and on a mountain in January that counts for more than it sounds.
The Odd Fellows were a lodge, and this was their hall. Now it opens at eight.
That's the case for breakfast in the Odd Fellows' old hall.
— The Editors
