Peppercorn Ceremony

On the Wednesday nearest to April 23, in a charmingly literal and anachronistic gesture that always plays well with the tourists, the Masonic Lodge of St. George No. 200 pays its annual “peppercorn rent” of one peppercorn to the governor for the Old State House in St. George. The ceremony includes a military parade, a rifle salute, the governor driving up in a landau, and the presentation of a single peppercorn perched on a silver plate that in turn sits upon a velvet cushion. The rent payment was first exacted in 1816, at a time when Freemason lodges were springing up throughout the British Empire. The real question, of course, is when, if ever, the lease runs out.