TERRE HAUTE —
Curiosity and appreciation of a landmark drew dozens to a Saturday tour of the Zorah Shrine Temple Building for a look inside a historic structure seldom visited by outsiders.
Tales of circus acts, cage fights, concerts and dances came to life in the third-floor auditorium of the North 7th Street building, where wooden theater seats silently await an audience of 1,500.
Elephants once climbed the back stairs of the building to reach the auditorium where the Zorah Shrine Circus entertained crowds for many years, Past Potentate Ron Smith told tour-takers.
Peg holes can still be seen in the floor where the trapeze apparatus were secured. The Shriners decided long ago not to repair the chipped edges of the stairsteps that were caused by the elephants and animal cages that where hoisted up as part of the circus.
Those chipped steps enrich the legacy of the building, constructed from 1926-27. Even though it’s been several decades since any audience has beheld the trumpet of an elephant in the room, Smith said, the building resounds with history.
It’s twin curving stone stairways flanking the main entrance at 420 N. 7th St. are no longer used. But little has changed from the original construction. Dark rich wood panels the meeting rooms. Photos of past potentates line the walls, and a 1909 photo of the first class members of the temple includes many historic faces, including that of local museum namesake Sheldon Swope.
“We’ve been here since 1927, and we plan to be here a lot longer,” Smith said.
The Shriners formed the local lodge in 1909 and got their charter in 1910 when the organization purchased a vacant church property, also on Seventh Street. Membership grew to about 1,400 men, and in 1926 the group purchased the current location for construction of the temple. That was just prior to the economic disaster of the Great Depression, and the members came up with different ways to make money to survive. They sold bricks, then insurance policies, and finally came up with the still-popular circus as a way to raise money.
After years of financial struggle, it was the “one-armed bandits” of slot machines that helped keep the doors of the building open, Smith said. Today, the Zorah Shrine organization is still active and thriving, though a little battered by recent bad weather.
A storm-damaged roof led to a repair project that led to other damage as a roof drain was clogged, causing an interior flood in three office rooms. Smith and current Potentate Steve Foote apologized to the tour guests for the minor disarray as they shared the temple history.
The name Zorah comes from an Arabian town outside Jerusalem, Smith said.
That fact was of particular interest to Nouf Alwadi and Tareg Alshaghaa, both students at Indiana State University, who are natives of Saudi Arabia.
“We had head a lot about it,” Alshaghaa said of the Shrine temple, “but we didn’t know anything about the organization.”
“It was a great experience,” Alwadi said of the tour.
Smith said the Shriners was started in 1872 in Manhattan, N.Y., as a Masonic organization by a not-so-serious group of fellows who liked to goof around. Their interests included clown troupes and comical bands, but in 1922 they got serious about their mission of helping children and created a hospital program that provides free medical care to children in need.
“There are no cash registers at our hospitals,” Smith said.
The Terre Haute temple takes that mission seriously, providing free van transportation and drivers to take children to orthopedic hospitals in St. Louis or Chicago, or to the burn treatment hospital in Cincinnati.
Five units of the Shriners organization are housed in the temple -- clowns, oriental band, patrol, drum and bugle corps and the past potentates and directors staff. The building is used not only for temple events, but is also rented for weddings, receptions, boxing matches and cage fighting.
An original artist’s rendering of the auditorium interior drew a lot of interest during the tour. While the structure of the room is the same, the rendering shows vibrant colors decorating the currently plain interior.
Foote said he has started a project that will hopefully involve some college art students painting those colors and designs on the walls and ceiling as originally intended in 1927.
“It’s really a cool old building,” Jenny Goodwin-Nation said at the close of the tour. “And it was interesting to hear about the history of the Shriners.”
Marilyn Lu and Jim Bray of the Terre Haute Landmarks organization agreed that the public should appreciate the historical and architectural significance of the city’s older buildings.
“A lot of people have driven by these buildings, but have never been inside,” Bray said as one reason for the monthly tours promoted by the landmarks group.
Preserving such structures can be a time-consuming task, Lu said, referring to the steps needed to have a building declared a historic landmark. But the effort is worth it historically.
Lisa Trigg can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or lisa.trigg@tribstar.com.
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Seeing inside a landmark: People touring the Zorah Shrine Temple Saturday stop in the upstairs auditorium where the Shriners once staged the Zorah Shrine Circus. Tribune-Star/Rachel Keyes
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Tribune-Star/Rachel Keyes Take a tour: The Zorah Shriner�s Building was open for tours Saturday afternoon.
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Tribune-Star/Rachel Keyes Historic tours: Past Potentate Ron Smith talks to a group of people about the history of the Zorah Shriners.
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Seeing inside a landmark: People touring the Zorah Shrine Temple Saturday stop in the upstairs auditorium where the Shriners once staged the Zorah Shrine Circus. Tribune-Star/Rachel Keyes
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VIDEO: Zorah Shrine opens its historic building for tour
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