When the first waves of Dutch, British, and Scottish settlers arrived in Ulster County, they brought with them more than tools and ambitions — they brought their lodges. Freemasonry functioned as a kind of invisible architecture of colonial and early American society: a fraternal system that gave immigrant communities a framework for trust, civic participation, and shared identity in an unfamiliar world. In this program, author and researcher Glenn Kreisberg explores the esoteric origins and local history of Freemasonry in Ulster County — who established the lodges, what principles guided them, and how they shaped the communities that formed around them. At the center of the story stands a remarkable Ulster County figure: Robert R. Livingston — the Chancellor — who as the first Grand Master of the unified American lodges swore in George Washington as President and, for the first time, brought the lodges of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania under a single brotherhood. It was a model that other communities would later make their own — Prince Hall Freemasonry, founded by free Black Americans in the same era, built a parallel tradition of brotherhood and civic belonging that endures to this day. What the lodges built wasn’t just brotherhood — it was a blueprint for how immigrant communities plant roots and claim a place in a new world.

About the Presenter
Glenn Kreisberg is an author, radio engineer, and New York State DEC outdoor guide based in Woodstock, NY. He researches archaeoastronomy and landscape archaeology in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, and served two terms as First Vice President of the New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA). He is co-founder of the Overlook Mountain Center in Woodstock, a nonprofit that stewards one of Ulster County’s most significant archaeological preserves, and has studied archaeoacoustics on Malta through the Old Temple Study Foundation and Heritage Malta. His work has been featured on The History Channel. His latest book explores the history of Freemasonry and its esoteric traditions in Ulster County and early America.

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