The I.O.O.F. Hall on Forest Street: Boulder Creek's Odd Fellows

There's a plaque on the building at 152 Forest Street that says 1900, and there's a hall upstairs that you can rent for a party. Both of those facts have been true of the Odd Fellows for a long time. The order was founded on the principle of a common fund for people who needed one, and a lodge hall is the physical version of that: a room the town can use.

The lodge room is the second floor. The ground floor is storefronts, currently Kitten Kornher, Boulder Creek Glass, and Geist Builders, so the building works the way lodge halls always have: the order keeps its room upstairs and the town does business below.

Boulder Creek Lodge #152 is still there, still running the hall, and still tending a cemetery in the woods.

Renting the hall

This is the practical part, and it's the reason most people arrive at this page. The lodge rents the building for events, and what's on offer is a real hall rather than a room in a restaurant: a lodge room, banquet and meeting rooms, and a kitchen that comes with china and flatware.

The published application asks for the following, and treats them as a starting point rather than a fixed price list, since it says rates depend on the type of group, the type of event, the length of the contract, and what the building has to do for you:

• Lodge room, including the banquet and meeting rooms but not the kitchen: $350
• Banquet and meeting rooms on their own: $50 an hour
• Kitchen, including use of the china and flatware: $150
• Refundable security and cleaning deposit: $300
• Setting up the day before costs extra

Read the terms before you fall in love with the room. You need liability insurance, at least $1,000,000 per occurrence, naming the lodge as additional insured, and you need it in writing if you're serving alcohol. The signed agreement is due 30 days before the event. Music has to be off at 11 p.m. and everyone out before 1 a.m., and amplified music may need a sound amplification permit. No candles or open flames of any kind. No smoking or vaping. You clean up, and the building has to be clean before noon the day after.

Cancel 25 or more days out and you get everything back. Closer in, you keep the deposit and part or none of the rental fee.

The rental application is a PDF on the lodge's site. Rates on that application are undated, so confirm them before you budget: call the lodge at 831-338-2531 or email BoulderCreekIOOF@gmail.com.

Boulder Creek is short on event space, and the down-valley options in our wedding venues guide mostly aren't in Boulder Creek at all. This one is, and it's walking distance from downtown.

Who the Odd Fellows are

The name is the joke that stuck. In seventeenth-century England, working people from different trades pooled part of their wages into a common fund to cover sickness, unemployment, and burial, and turned out to help each other rebuild a barn or put in a crop after a bad season. It was odd enough at the time to find people organized purely to give aid that the name got attached and never came off.

The order calls itself the Three Link Fraternity, for Friendship, Love, and Truth. It was founded in North America in Baltimore on April 26, 1819, when Thomas Wildey and four members from England instituted Washington Lodge No. 1, in a city then dealing with yellow fever and mass unemployment. The stated purpose was to visit the sick, relieve the distress, bury the dead, and educate the orphans.

It was also the first national fraternity in the country to include both men and women, when it adopted the Rebekah Degree on September 20, 1851. Boulder Creek's lodge installs its officers jointly with a Rebekah lodge.

The lodge in Boulder Creek

The Santa Cruz County Historical Trust plaque on the Forest Street building reads "1900, I.O.O.F. Hall, Built by Boulder Creek Lodge 152." And the county's Historic Resources Inventory agrees: its 1986 survey describes the hall as built in 1900 for the lodge, standing on its original site, and in continuous lodge use up to that survey. It describes ground-floor storefronts and notes alterations to the front facade. Local historian Lisa Robinson's history of the valley records a merchant opening for business on the lower floor of the IOOF building in August 1900, which only works if the building was up by then (Santa Cruz County Historic Resources Inventory, DPR 523 form for the I.O.O.F. Lodge Hall, 1980s survey with a 1994 addendum).

The lodge became part of how the town ran almost at once. Edward Martin's 1911 History of Santa Cruz County, writing up a local man's life, notes in passing that he was a member of Boulder Creek Lodge No. 152 and had held all of its chairs (pp. 220 and 221), the sort of detail that only gets written down when a lodge is part of how a town organizes itself. See the logging boom and our history timeline for what the town looked like around it.

The lodge is younger than the hall makes it look, and the newspapers settle it. The San Francisco Call of 11 February 1900 carried a dispatch from Santa Cruz: an Odd Fellows lodge had been instituted at Boulder Creek the previous evening, 10 February, with forty members, and a large delegation had come from San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz and other towns. The Call's own fraternal column in the same issue names the men who did it: C. E. Taylor, District Deputy Grand Master, with Grand Secretary George T. Shaw and Assistant Grand Secretary I. S. G. Clifford.

So the lodge and the hall are the same year's work, and there is no long stretch of borrowed rooms to account for. The June 1892 Sanborn map does show a second-floor lodge room downtown, on Main north of the creek beside the old San Lorenzo Hotel, but Sanborn never records which order used a room, and in 1892 this lodge did not yet exist.

The lodge has a formal name and number, and the newspapers use it: Boulder Creek Lodge No. 152, I.O.O.F.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel of 29 May 1910 records two conveyances to the lodge trustees in its routine real-estate transfer column, both for a nominal ten dollars, which is the shape of a gift rather than a sale. Isaiah Hartman and his wife conveyed a lot in the northeast quarter of the southwest quarter of section 30; J. W. Peery and others conveyed tracts in section 20. Both in township 9 south, range 2 west.

Two things follow. Hartman turns up again thirteen years later, lending more than half the thousand dollars needed to buy the Grace Episcopal building, so he is a recurring benefactor rather than a one-off. And J. W. Peery, the sawmill man who laid out Lorenzo in 1875, was still conveying land here in 1910, which is a further nail in the old line that he moved on.

The cemetery

At the end of Harmon Street, a white gate marked I.O.O.F. opens onto three acres of redwoods, with graves fitted in wherever the trees allow, some perched on slopes steep enough that the stones lean into the hill. Despite the initials on the gate, it's a community cemetery. Anybody can be buried there, and the town's founding families are.

The headstone that looks oldest, dated 1862, is a promise kept. Martha S. Peery died of consumption in 1862 while she and her husband Joseph were crossing to California, and he buried her along the trail under a cottonwood headboard he carved with a jack knife. Thirty-seven years later he went back for her, and on July 25, 1899, he reinterred her here in a plot he'd prepared years before. The earliest recorded burial on the ground itself dates to 1882.

By local historian Lisa Robinson's account in the Mountain Bulletin, the cemetery came to the Odd Fellows the way a lot of things in a small town do: somebody had to take care of it. In 1909 it was offered to the Boulder Creek lodge as a free gift, along with adjoining land from J. W. Peery and Isaiah Hartman, on condition the lodge maintain it as an up-to-date cemetery, and in early 1910 the deed passed to the trustees of Lodge No. 152. That April the lodge held a cleanup day; the Mountain Echo reported nearly eighty people served lunch, schoolchildren among them. Volunteers are still doing the same work more than a century later.

A 1997 grave survey by Chris and Susan Benson, posted on the lodge's own site, counted 156 markers, three of them Civil War veterans, with the same family names recurring the way they do in a town this size: Peery, Pilger, Horstman, Hesse, Branson.

In August 2020 the CZU fire burned through the woods right up to the gates. Firefighters held the line at the cemetery by hand, stone by stone, and it came through with scorched undergrowth and singed pickets but its monuments intact, as the San Lorenzo Valley Post recorded that November.

Burying the dead was one of the four founding purposes of the order, so a lodge holding a cemetery is the original job rather than a sideline. The grave map and fee schedule pages on the lodge's site currently sit empty, so if you're researching family here or asking about a plot, the lodge office is the place to start.

Still active

The website's newest news is from 2019, which says more about who maintains websites than about who maintains the lodge. The Odd Fellows co-host the town's Winter Festival each December alongside the business association and the recreation district. See our holiday events guide.

There's also a standing fundraiser: Java Bob's donates 20 percent of proceeds to the Boulder Creek IOOF when you enter IOOF at checkout, and takes 5 percent off your order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the Boulder Creek IOOF Hall?

152 Forest Street, Boulder Creek, CA 95006, a short walk from downtown.

Can I rent the hall for an event?

Yes. The lodge rents the lodge room, the banquet and meeting rooms, and a kitchen, singly or together. Call 831-338-2531 or email BoulderCreekIOOF@gmail.com.

How much does it cost to rent?

The published application lists $350 for the lodge room with the banquet and meeting rooms, $50 an hour for the banquet and meeting rooms alone, $150 for the kitchen, and a $300 refundable deposit. The application is undated and says rates depend on the event, so confirm before you budget.

Do I need insurance?

Yes. The agreement requires liability cover of at least $1,000,000 per occurrence with the lodge named as additional insured, and proof of it if you're serving alcohol.

How late can an event run?

Music off at 11 p.m., everyone out before 1 a.m., per the rental agreement. Amplified music may need a sound amplification permit.

Is there a kitchen?

Yes, and it comes with china and flatware. It's priced separately from the rooms.

Where is the IOOF cemetery?

At the end of Harmon Street, behind a white gate marked I.O.O.F., on three acres of redwoods above town.

Who can be buried there?

It's a community cemetery, not a members-only one. Contact the lodge office at 831-338-2531 or BoulderCreekIOOF@gmail.com about plots; the fee schedule page on the lodge's site is not currently filled in.

How old is the building?

A Santa Cruz County Historical Trust plaque on it says 1900 and credits Boulder Creek Lodge 152 with building it. The county's Historic Resources Inventory gives the same date, and a merchant is recorded opening on the lower floor in August 1900. No deed has surfaced.

The rental application is undated, so confirm rates and availability with the lodge.

The hall is one thread in a longer story, and a short history of Boulder Creek picks up the rest. If you hold lodge records or family recollections we have not seen, we would like to hear from you.

Sources

• Edward Martin, History of Santa Cruz County (1911)
• Lisa Robinson on the I.O.O.F. cemetery, Santa Cruz Mountain Bulletin
• Chris and Susan Benson, 1997 grave survey
• The lodge's own hall rental page
• Santa Cruz County historic resources inventory, DPR 523 record for the I.O.O.F. Lodge Hall, 13103 Highway 9, 1986 survey, pages 1–3.

Links checked 16 August 2026, and the two 1900 newspaper links 4 September 2026.