The Odd Fellows were once the largest fraternal organization in the United States. Much like other such associations, their decline has been rapid and devastating, but remarkably, some still bear great faith in the future of Odd Fellowship.
Oddfellows Café + Bar is a popular brunch spot in Seattle where you can get a salmon benedict for $29 ($34 with avocado). For seating, it has pews, procured from the nearby St. Joseph Church. Oddfellows’ founder and previous owner, Linda Derschang, bought them for their “history”—not their actual history but for “evoking the feeling” of history. Oddfellows was also part of the area occupied in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. During this period, a mural hung in front that read: “STAND SIX STEPS BACK AND PROMISE YOU LOVE ME.”
![](https://damagemag.com/content/images/2024/05/odd-man-img-7-1.jpg)
Oddfellows employees believe that the place is haunted by ghosts. They’ve seen them and heard them, or at least they’ve told their boss Derschang (who has a penchant for the supernatural) that they have. Designed to conjure an air of history without any particular content, plopped at the intersection of wealth and anarchy, it’s no great surprise that specters might inhabit this dizzying array of cultural contradictions. And we don’t need to go very far to find them. They’re right there in the name.
The restaurant shares that name with the building it occupies, the Odd Fellows Building, constructed in 1908 by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The Order owned the building until 1995, when it was discovered that a neo-Nazi separatist movement had infiltrated the Lodge. The national organization quickly disbanded the group and sold the building to a local real estate investor, who maintained the space as a home to many arts organizations in a self-consciously bohemian neighborhood. In 2007, the building was sold again, and most artists were forced to leave. The dance studio Century Ballroom is all that remains of a once vibrant arts space; now its occupants sell running shoes, sustainable apparel, and protective cases for laptops and tablets. This transformation represents in condensed form the broader “Amazon-ification” of a once sleepy Pacific Northwest hub.
In the eighteenth century, the Odd Fellows were “friendly societies” in Britain that got together to socialize and help one another out; “mutual aid networks” might be a more contemporary designation. As it is today, this was considered “odd” at the time, and it’s appropriate that the organization’s titular “oddness,” in one theory, refers specifically to the audacity of associational life that was budding at the time. In 1843, American Odd Fellows lodges separated themselves officially from the British, forming the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. It’s counted amongst its members Ulysses S. Grant, Wyatt Earp, William Jennings Bryan, Charlie Chaplin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1851, the IOOF was the first fraternal organization in the country to make a place for women through the creation of the “Beautiful Rebekah Degree,” though it took another 150 years for the organization to become co-ed. Today both men and women can be Odd Fellows, and both can also attain the degree of Rebekah.
During the so-called “Golden Age of Fraternalism” (the late nineteenth/early twentieth century), the IOOF was the largest fraternal group in the country, even larger than the Freemasons. It also bore a more working-class membership than did the more elite Masons. No surprise then that the Great Depression and subsequent New Deal hit the Odd Fellows hard: with members struggling to keep up with dues and the state increasingly taking on the function of social provisioning, the IOOF began a steady decline. Its membership has since dropped by roughly 40-50% every decade as a proportion of the total population; today it has just more than 25,000 members.