The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

5. That the Fund be called the Masonic Charity Fund.

Fortunately for the Masons, as it eventually proved, this offer was not accepted, owing to the violence of the distrust, which showed itself in many forms of opposition. The money was therefore kept in the hands of private parties, and later it formed the nucleus of the present charity fund of the lodge.

The storm gradually subsided, as the element of politics was eliminated from it, and common-sense once more resumed its authority in Cambridge as elsewhere. After an interval of seven years and a half, a petition for the restoration of the charter was signed by eleven members of the lodge as it stood in 1838, to which were added the signatures of other brethren, who thus declared their interest in the reorganization, and their purpose to support the lodge. On the 27th of December, 1845, the charter was restored to Isaac Livermore, Isaiah Bangs, Nathaniel Livermore, Thomas F. Norris, Jacob H. Bates, John Edwards, Jonathan Hyde, Charles Tufts, John Chamberlin, Nathaniel Munroe, and Emery Willard. At the first meeting when the lodge was organized for business, several new members were elected, and one of them, Lucius R. Paige, was elected Master. Simon W. Robinson, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge, installed the officers. From that time there has been no break in the regular meetings and proper business of the lodge.

After the reorganization, meetings were held in the hall of Friendship Lodge of Odd Fellows, on Main Street, nearly opposite Pearl Street, and this hall was used until its destruction by fire in 1854, when Amicable Lodge removed with the Odd Fellows to Friendship Hall on Pearl Street, between Green and Franklin streets. In 1866 their present commodious apartments were fitted up on Main Street, now Massachusetts Avenue, No. 685.

On the 18th of October, 1855, a semi-centennial address was delivered to the lodge by Rev. Lucius R. Paige. At that time Amicable Lodge numbered only sixty-two members. At the seventy-fifth anniversary, J. Warren Cotton was the orator of the occasion, and announced the number of members as 206, notwithstanding the loss of forty members, who had transferred their immediate allegiance to Putnam, Mount Olivet, and Mizpah