“At the end of April 1929 the Arundel Lodge of Masons filed a plan at the Registry of Deeds in Alfred for what was to be the site on Temple Street beside the millpond where their new temple was to be built. It had been announced in the Kennebunk Star on March 22 that the Masons were going to raise a $12,000 building there. The regularly renewed lease they had held since 1878 on second-floor and third-floor rooms in Dock Square’s then new Brown Block (later the Colonial Pharmacy building) was due to expire in May, and they would not renew it again. The owners of the building had raised the rent to a point almost prohibitive and would do nothing about repairs. It was time for the Arundel Lodge, Kennebunkport’s most vital fraternal society, to put up their own building.”
Joyce Butler in “Kennebunkport, The Evolution of an American Town”