1945 Area J Fellowship Meeting
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1945 Area J Fellowship Slide
The lodges of Area J met at Camp Echockotee in November of 1945 for their Fellowship Meeting. Echockotee 200 was the host lodge for this event. This might be the first such meeting of these lodges. This is the first piece of memorabilia known to me from this area. I thank Robert Mathis for supplying the images used in this and forthcoming posts about Area J meetings.
This neckerchief slide should look very familiar to those who collect North Carolina Conclave Memorabilia. The piece is almost identical in design and text to the 1945 Area I Fellowship Meeting neckerchief slide.
1945 Area J Fellowship Meeting Program
Robert Mathis also sent an image of the cover from the program from this meeting. The cover, pictured and probably a photocopy of the original, states this area serves Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. However both McLean and Riddle’s A Golden Legacy: A 50th Anniversary History of the Dixie Fellowships and Rob Higgins’ OA Sections website have all the lodges covering South Carolina in Area Z in 1945.
According to McLean and Riddle the following lodges were in Area J in 1945:
- Seminole 85
- Tomo Chi-Chi 119
- Echockotee 200
- Chattahoochee 204
- Calusa 219
- Chawtaw 229
- Aal-Pa-Tah 237
- Suriarco 239
- Wehadkee 273
Can anyone reading this resolve the apparent contradiciton between the 1945 program and the other sources cited regarding which lodges were in this section? Was Area Z split off in 1945 or 1946?
The July 1945 National OA Bulletin lists Area Z as having come into existence by that time. Accordingly, the South Carolina OA lodges were out of Area J and in Area Z at least by July 1945.
If I had to make a guess as to why “S. Carolina” is on the paper, I would speculate that the Area J leadership may have drawn it up before Area Z was created - or they drew it up before they KNEW or REALIZED that Area Z had been created!
John:
McLean & Riddle may have erred when they included O-Shot-Caw 265 as a lodge in Area J in 1945. The lodge in South Florida was first named “Allapawtaw” (not to be confused with “Aal-Pa-Tah”), lasted but a few years, then was resurrected in 1955 as O-Shot-Caw.
And Lodge 85 may have still been under the name of Kiandashama.