The Pottsville Moose Home (Charles M. Atkins Mansion)

The building at 396 South Centre Street began not as a clubhouse but as the mansion of Charles M. Atkins, one of Pottsville’s nineteenth-century ironmasters, who gave his name to the Atkins Furnaces. A construction date of about 1865 is repeated in local histories, though it is best treated as tradition rather than a firmly documented figure. ✎ A neighboring historical marker celebrates Atkins in the grand idiom of local memory as “a steel baron during the dawn of America’s Industrial Revolution… considered to be America’s second richest man” — a flourish that captures his local reputation but cannot be taken literally. ⚑

The Moose buy the Atkins home (1917)

The Loyal Order of Moose organized in Pottsville in December 1910 and was formally instituted as Pottsville Lodge No. 411 on January 22, 1911, with 109 charter members. After several years in rented quarters the lodge made the purchase that would define it for the next century: on April 1, 1917 it bought the Atkins mansion for $28,000 and spent a further $6,000 fitting it out as a meeting hall and social club, under the front-page headline “Moose Buy the Atkins Home.”

The years just after were the lodge’s golden decade. It enlarged the home with a substantial annex, burned its mortgage in full on July 4, 1920, and grew from about 952 members in 1917 to 2,061 by 1921 — which the lodge’s own 1921 anniversary account called the largest of any Moose lodge in proportion to its town’s population. The same period carried the era’s hardships: the influenza pandemic took 45 members of the lodge. For the next half-century the Moose Home was a fixture of Pottsville’s civic life. As an honest matter of record, the national Loyal Order of Moose, like many white fraternal orders of the period, restricted membership to white men — a policy that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis (1972), national context that situates Lodge No. 411 within the fraternal world it belonged to.

A second life (1994–present)

As fraternal membership declined across the anthracite region, the lodge sold the mansion in 1994. After an early-2000s redevelopment the building was leased as a bank branch (Legacy Bank, later First National Bank of Pennsylvania) and today serves as multi-tenant professional offices. The structure still stands — photographed as the “former Atkins Mansion” as recently as 2024 — within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.