File:Masonic Temple building - Bozeman Montana - 2013-070-09.jpg

English: The Masonic Temple building (2 E Main Street/14 S. Tracy Avenue), in Bozeman, Montana.

The Freemason fraternal organization first came to Bozeman in 1866. Like many pioneers of the mid 1860s, they were Southerners looking for gold and silver. These men, most of them ex-Confederate soldiers, formed Gallatin Masonic Lodge No. 6 on October 4, 1866, in a room on the upper floor of the Stafford and Rice Hotel (137 E. Main, at Main and Bozeman Avenue). Lodge No. 6 purchased the hotel later that year for $500 -- using the upper floor for the lodge, and renting the first floor to the Empire Corral and later Osborn's Drug Store. But they refused to admit blacks (a common problem in Freemasonry at the time), and they also refused to admit any whites who had fought for or supported the Union side.

In 1870, Nathaniel Langford was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Montana. When he learned about the restrictive membership practice of Lodge No. 6, he suspended the lodge's charter. The following year, a committee met to review Langford's action. They upheld his suspension of the charter, and furthermore discovered that a mere six members of Lodge No. 6 were the ones stirring up trouble between North and South. However, the committee also recommended that the charter be restored, and that if there were any Masons who wanted to form their own lodge -- them them do so.

Thus, on October 8, 1872, Bozeman Lodge No. 18 was formed. By this time, relationships between the Northerners and Southerners were easing. Lodge 18 rented space for its meetings from Lodge 6. In time, both lodges agreed to allow dual-membership, and as of 2010 about a dozen men held memberships in both lodges.

Lodge No. 6 still occupies 137 E. Main. In the 1880s, the lodge built two more structures just to the west of the lodge.

It wasn't until 1935 that Lodge No. 18 built its own headquarters at 2 E. Main. This two-story building has 12,320 square feet of useable interior space. Most of the ground floor is retail space, and the upper floors are rented out to various organizations -- including the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which has a large bar and dance hall there. The building is not historically intact; most of the second floor windows have been sealed with brick and stucco, and nearly all of the building's original facade is gone.... replaced on the first floor by bland, post-Modernist faux brick arches and on the second floor by a flat, uniform, yellow stucco wall.

Despite its location it is not a contributing property to the Main Street Historic District (which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 21, 1987).

It is also not a contributing property to the South Tracy-South Black Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 21, 1987. (That district begins two blocks to the south.)