It is difficult to understand how this reference to a secret order has passed unnoticed for so long, for it is scarcely less than a proclamation of the Society of Unknown Philosophers.
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America
Many of the world’s preindustrial empires maintained folkloric and even quasi-magical legends about their own founding. From the Romans to the Aztecs, cultures have liked to fancy themselves preferred by the gods. Like it or not, a common myth seems to help hold a society together.
Young as we are, we have those rumors about the United States. Most of the material is less religious than it is occult, as in “connected to the involvement of the underground philosophical societies.” You don’t have to believe in the effectiveness of occult philosophies or in any form of magical practice to see why the New World would interest the occultists of the Old. The perfectibility of the human being and the betterment of the entire world have been the avowed goals of most of the classic Western philosophical societies. By the age of Columbus, the Church and the aristocracies had Europe in a vise. The New World seemed a chance to start over. It was a laboratory for many players.
The Freemasons were the most conspicuous of the potential founding influences. The Lodge was a fad in the day among upwardly mobile men, and most of the big players on both sides of the Revolution were Freemasons. The Revolution has indeed been interpreted as a Masonic schism. Masonic stylings have made their way into the civic architecture of many American cities, including Buffalo. You could take this down a lot of speculative rabbit-holes. [See a couple of my books, including Shadows of the Western Door (1997) and Buffalo’s Occult Architecture, Volume 1 (2024).]
Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) was probably the finest scholar who devoted himself to a study of Freemasonry. He dissected the Great Seal of America for its heavy Masonic symbolism. He also hauled up many a folkloric tidbit. One of his nuggets concerns “The Unknown Patriot” (or sometimes, “…Orator”), an imposing man with a stentorian voice, who, in Independence Hall on July 4, 1776, roused quailing signers to step up to the Declaration with ink and quill. I see why hearts might have been faint. Putting your name to that document was slipping your neck into a noose, at least should the gambit fail. (To those it considered rebels, Britannia was no more known for mercy than was Rome.) The trouble is that this Unknown Orator vanished–from a guarded hall!–after his address. No one knew him, which was a curiosity on its own. How did he get in? Was he a wizard? An illusion? A ghost–a rare talking one? The emissary of an occult society who wanted the new nation with so much promise to make its full break from Europe?
Fifty years later to the day was another curious incident, and nothing’s fanciful about it.
Two of the Founding Fathers, second President John Adams (1735-1826) and third President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), represented two major debates over the style of government the young United States was to have. Both towering intellects, they were bitter political rivals. Yet in their later years, the Virginian Jefferson and the Bostonian Adams worried that the young nation might not survive without its founding spirits. On July 4, 1826–fifty years to the day after signing the Declaration–John Adams lay on his deathbed. “I die,” he gasped, with hope and faith. “But Jefferson lives!” Alas, Jefferson had breathed his last just hours before. In another odd coincidence, the fifth U.S. President James Monroe (1758-1831) chose July 4, too, to follow them into Spirit–five years later.
While we’re on July 4 and odd anniversaries, let’s come closer to home, to Buffalo’s magnificent Old County Hall–whose architect Andrew Jackson Warner (1833-1910) was a prominent Genesee Valley Freemason. During the dedication ceremony on July 4, 1876, a hush spread over the vast crowd. Word had arrived via telegraph ofCuster’s disaster, the U.S. Army’s worst defeat to a force of First Nations Americans. That has to be some kind of omen. An exact century later–July 4, 1976–the bronze statue we have here of George Washington in his Masonic regalia was dedicated.
While we’re on anniversaries and Old County Hall, we should point out another presidential coincidence, involving President William McKinley–assassinated in Buffalo.
H65676 U.S. Copyright Office. Photograph of wash drawing by T. Dart Walker. Picrylcom
On the morning of the day he was shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz (“Shul-gus,” I hear) President McKinley visited the Devil’s Hole Cave, widely thought to be cursed. The Devil’s Hole, as we recall, was the site of the famous bushwhack-massacre of September 15, 1763. A Seneca war-party shot up a British wagon train and then gave the same medicine to the relief force that marched up from Fort Schlosser. The best single reason I’ve heard for the attack is that it might have been some spin off of Chief Pontiac’s War against the British. Another theory is that it was a labor dispute. The Seneca had been downsized from their jobs as porters.
What is clear is that the popular President was shot in the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in North Buffalo. He died in the now-demolished Milburn Mansion near Delaware and West Ferry by the campus of today’s Canisius High School. His death fell on September 15, the date of the Massacre at the ill-starred site he had visited. He lay in state for a few days in Old County Hall–where the apparition of his recumbent form has been reported.
We should point out another connection between Old County Hall and the Devil’s Hole. One of the leaders of the Massacre was most likely the then-young Seneca Farmer’s Brother (c. 1730-1815). The worthy chief–later a Buffalonian–had a colorful career. He may have fought for the British in 1755 at the Battle of the Monongahela. He fought against the British, as we see, in 1763. He was surely fighting for the British at the Battle of Newtown (near Elmira) in 1779, trying to stem the tide of Sullivan’s Campaign. The still-sturdy chief stood with the citizens of Buffalo against the British and Canadians in the War of 1812. When the old war horse, then an American hero, was laid to rest with full military honors, it was here–in the Franklin Square Burying Ground at the northeast corner of the block Old County Hall occupies. You can find him at Forest Lawn today.
As we ponder the 250th birthday of the United States, we drift back to more occult speculation, and that concerning President John Adams. In paranormal circles there is a buzz about an obscure society called “The Order of the Dragon,” a surviving strain of Europe’s indigenous paganism. Possibly Druidic, earth-centered, and Goddess-oriented, the Dragon society is said to have come to these shores with the presidential Adams family. The Adams line indeed hailed from Glastonbury, home of Arthur’s Camelot and Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. The influence of the Dragons was said to have survived into Adams’ vision of American government.
Around 2000 I crossed paths with Andrew Rothovius (1919-2009), one of the founders of the idea. The delightful New Hampshire antiquarian didn’t give me any proof of this “Dragon Society” that overwhelmed the massive unlikelihood of the idea. Yet it’s known that strains of ancient mystical thought have crossed the Atlantic. Trunks of books about Hermetic/occult subjects made it to New England villages with clans whose descendants ended up major players in the Church of Mormon. I encounter old folk-beliefs all the time in my interviews with people of the varied ethnicities of the Niagara Frontier.
For people like me, it’s charming to fancy that some softer strain of the Old Ways could be out there still plugging to turn us back toward the more natural, more spiritual past. I also wish we could begin to talk to one another again. I wish we could see the humanity in even people who don’t agree with us.
Lead image: Crowds at the Temple of Music, where McKinley was assassinated at Pan American Exposition | Public Domain | Picryl
© Mason Winfield 2026