Look for a two-story wooden building with a flat rectangular front, tall rectangular windows, and a neat cornice at the roofline.
This site held one of Fairbanks’s great survivors. In nineteen oh six, the downtown fire tore through the young business district and nearly reset the town in a single blow. The flames stopped about a block from here, and this building, first put up for the Tanana Commercial Company, remained standing while so much around it vanished.
Two years later, Tanana Lodge Number Three bought it. That matters, because the Masons were more than a fraternal club; they were part of the social framework that helped a rough mining town steady itself. They added lodge rooms at the rear and a main hall, then, in nineteen thirteen, did something most passersby would never suspect: they raised the entire building. That bold move created a seven-foot basement ceiling, as if Fairbanks had literally lifted its past to keep using it.
The formal facade added in nineteen sixteen gives this wooden structure a frontier version of Renaissance Revival style, borrowing the dignity of older city buildings. In nineteen twenty-three, President Warren G. Harding spoke from these steps during his Alaska journey. Less than three weeks later, he died in San Francisco.
Then came one last narrow escape. The roof collapsed in twenty eighteen, only about thirty minutes after restaurant workers next door had been inside. No one was hurt. The rest came down the next day. Hold in mind, then, not rubble, but a building raised above its first life. From here, continue to the George C. Thomas Memorial Library, where another kind of foundation took hold.
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