Browning Masonic Community

Side A: This location was selected in 1936 for a Memorial Home for aged Masons, at the wishes of Otis Avery Browning. Browning, a prominent Toledo businessman, book publisher, civic leader, and Mason, set forth the plans for this Home in a will he prepared in 1922, creating a trust for the Otis Avery Browning Masonic Memorial Fund. His will states, “It is one of the chief purposes of my will, that I may become an instrument, under God’s directing care, in providing for the erection and maintenance of a home for aged people, where they may be properly cared for and with all modern comforts.” Side B: Otis Avery Browning’s will required that funds be invested for fifty years after his death. The memorial fund grew from the time of Browning’s death in 1923 until 1979, when ground was broken here for the construction of a Memorial Home for Master Masons, their wives and their widows. The formal dedication took place on July 26, 1981, and the first residents moved into the Home in October 1981. Browning said of The Home in his will, “God will ever reward the true and faithful, and that same love and care extended for others may sometime come to you.”