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Pasque du Prairie College No. 182
HISTORY
Many of us in the Masonic fraternity belong to Lodges, Chapters, Councils, Commanderies, Valleys and Temples that go back a hundred years and more. If the Mason is the least bit interested in "from whence he came" he wonders what transpired in the days and months before the dispensation for these Masonic bodies was given. How did it come to be? How did it happen?
Pasque du Prairie York Rite College No. 182 is new. We have an opportunity to document our progress towards the goal…a charter for our College. I am Harlan F. "Pete" Peterson the charter Governor. I will be writing this in the first person. A third person account would be more "journalistic", but I don't write well in that style…too much like European royalty. I didn't do it all, but was in the forefront of all actions taken to obtain our charter, so bear with me.
Over the years I had heard and seen occasional references to a "York Rite College." My curiosity got the best of me, so at the September, 1995 Grand York Rite session in South Dakota I made a few inquiries to some Companions from neighboring cities, asking "what's a York Rite College? All my answers were "I don't know," or prefaced by "I think." As I look back on it now, I probably wasn't asking the right people. I'm from eastern South Dakota (Sioux Falls). Only later did I find there was a College in the western part of the state (Black Hills College No. 29).
Enter Lawrence W. O. "Larry" Holmes. Larry was a "refugee" from North Dakota working on his PhD at the University of South Dakota. Sometime in 1996 we were talking and I remembered to ask if he knew anything about the York Rite College. He told me he was a member (Wild Prairie Rose College No. 56. He gave me the "broad brush" purposes of a College, and it seemed to me that it would be something we should investigate. There were no other Colleges conveniently located near us. The Black Hills College was 400 miles away. The nearest Colleges in nearby states were at least 250 miles distant. I asked Larry to try and get some information and the requirements for obtaining a charter for a College in eastern South Dakota. We also had heard rumors that there had been some sort of a College in eastern South Dakota maybe 25 years ago, and Larry was to see if that was true.
Larry wrote the Sovereign College office in Detroit and in a letter dated Oct 4, 1996, then Secretary General Henry A. Montague said that his search revealed no previous college in recent years. He enclosed the dispensation forms for a new College together with instructions and how much money to send in for a charter fee.
Our approach to recruiting new charter members will seem a bit odd to some of you, but I think it will make sense with an understanding of the background. At that time the Cryptic degrees were not a requirement for advancement to the orders of the Commandery in South Dakota (this has since changed). There was, however, an effort being made to require the Royal and Select Masters degrees to become a Knight Templar. At about that time several Companions in Brookings (50 miles north of Sioux Falls) decided to try to form a new Cryptic Council in their city. There had been a Chapter and Commandery in Brookings for many years. At that time, also, Alpha Council No. 1 in Sioux Falls had not presented the Cryptic degrees for 2 years. So it was deemed prudent to form a joint degree team with the 2 cities to get a good core group together and do the degrees in a somewhat adequate manner. I took it upon myself to be the organizer of this team. We had our first, organizational meeting for the team in late 1996.
Since a requirement for membership in a York Rite College is that the Brother must be in good standing in all four York bodies it was thought that we would run up a trial balloon for a College at this meeting and see how it would fly. Besides an assurance that everyone at the meeting would meet that requirement, there was another aspect that proved very helpful. As previously mentioned, the Cryptic degrees were not required for the Commandery. As Council membership was an option, it seemed to attract those dedicated Masons who were not above putting in a little extra effort for the good of the Craft. At that meeting 19 Companions committed themselves to the effort, and put in $10 each to cover expenses.
We then proceeded to get our petition for dispensation signed and also to recruit more charter members to fill out our numbers and be more representative of the area we intended to cover. I mentioned in the previous paragraph that the situation in the Cryptic Rite in South Dakota tended to attract dedicated Masons. In our original group there were 2 Past Grand Masters of Masons, 3 Past Grand High Priests, 3 Past M.I. Grand Masters of the Grand Council (and the current M.I.G.M.), 3 Past Grand Commanders (one, Rt.E. Past Grand Commander Lee Sideras passed away before our petition was submitted), and numerous other officers including several in the advancing York Rite lines.
Getting signatures on the petition from around a fairly large area took a little longer than we had originally planned, but it finally got done. As I was typing out the petition I came to the line for the College name. We hadn't even thought about that. So a frantic call to Larry Holmes "what do we name this College" produced this advice: "Name it after a flower…that's what they did in North Dakota." So we called it "Pasque du Prairie" (see separate "What's in a Name" article).
Our petition for dispensation and check were mailed to Grand Governor Richard Geib on July 27th, 1997. In December we received a letter that our petition for dispensation had been approved by Governor General Donald A. King on October 16. We then proceeded to line up help to confer the Knight of York degree upon the petitioners who had not received it before. After scrubbing lots of dates, we finally settled on May 23rd, 1998 for the degree and setting the College to work.
We owe a great deal to the then Grand Governor of Minnesota, Jerry Korstad, and the Companion Knights of Minnesota College No. 39 for much help. They came to Sioux Falls in force and presented the Knight of York degree in an admirable manner to the 23 candidates present.
With a membership of 30, we were then able to submit our petition for the charter. This was approved at the 1998 General Assembly.
It should be mentioned that after we submitted our petition for dispensation we discovered that previous rumors had been true…there had been a College in eastern South Dakota called Keystone College No. 26. No one seemed to know what happened and why it was no longer on the rolls. We decided to continue as planned. There is a town in South Dakota named Keystone and there had been a Royal Arch Chapter with the same name. We thought best to start anew with no excess baggage.
