Our members are Master Masons from various lodges. We elect a Worshipful Master and all other officers every year just like a regular lodge. We hold a charter granted by the Grand Lodge of Virginia, but we are not allowed to initiate, pass, or raise Masons. We only meet around four times a year on Saturdays. At every meeting, a member or guest speaker will present a research paper on Masonic history, philosophy, or symbolism, followed by a question and answer session to delve deeper into the subject of the paper.

At times, we will have dueling papers, where two members will present different sides of a topic, such as the One Day Conferrals. Some lodges, like the Civil War Lodge of Research, will meet at special locations such as historic battlefields, and that location will be the subject of that day's paper. You must be a Master Mason in good standing to attend a research lodge. If you choose to affiliate, you will be voted on and admitted that same day.

You are then expected to prepare a paper of your own and present it in a timely fashion. There are now six research lodges at various locations throughout the state. Dues for each are usually $20 a year and we offer LMIPs. The original, Virginia Research Lodge No. 1777, meets at the Masonic Home of Virginia in Highland Springs, Virginia. It was chartered in 1950 and Most Worshipful James Noah Hillman was the charter Worshipful Master through 1958. At one time most of the Grand Lodge Officers would be active members, and you would often find a Past Grand Master sitting in the East. Virginia Research also sponsors the Allen E. Roberts Memorial Library, with an impressive collection of Masonic literature available for free to Master Masons.

There are a number of Masonic Organizations, both in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and in most every country in the world. We have cataloged many of these, and make them available on this website, including the ability to search and a link to each organization's website.

Grand Lodges | Virginia Lodges | York Rite | Scottish Rite | Eastern Star | Masonic Bodies | Research Bodies

In 2019, Most Worshipful William Edward Hershey, Jr., Grand Master of Masons in Virginia, established the Masonic Research District, removing all Research Lodges from their geographical district and placing them all in the same district. The theory is that Research Lodges operate differently from regular Blue Lodges and need to be managed in a way that better suits our nature. Rt. Wor. Marc Allen Hone was our District Deputy Grand Master for the first two years and managed our reorganization. There are six Research Lodges in Virginia, and we continue towards our goal work together, share research papers, and support each other so that we all may grow. The Research Lodges in Virginia are listed below:

During COVID, all Masonic meetings were halted. As an alternative, some Lodges began having meetings online, using platforms such as Zoom. Virginia Research Lodge was one of the first, and we have continued to hold these online Zoom meetings. Since it went without saying that a Zoom meeting was not an actual stated, we took to calling these our "Unstated Meetings" and the nickname stuck.