History is being saved on Auburn Avenue thanks to a $2 million grant from the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation, part of the Woodruff-Whitehead family.

The Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, one of the most significant buildings of Atlanta’s civil rights movement, is finally garnering community-wide support for its restoration.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is working with leaders of the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge to finish out a $13.5 million campaign to preserve the building, purchase it and donate it to the National Park Service (NPS) King Historic District. Another $2.5 million needs to be raised by August so the project can take advantage of Georgia’s Historic Preservation tax credits.

“You can simply feel the history inside the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge,” said Russ Hardin, president of the Woodruff-Whitehead foundations. “Lettie Pate Evans appreciated history and gave generously herself for historic preservation. She would be pleased that her foundation is supporting the preservation of an Atlanta treasure. Hats off to the Masons, TPL, NPS and the many others in our community who have come together to save the Lodge.”

The Prince Hall Masonic Lodge was built between 1937 and 1941, and it was developed by John Wesley Dobbs, a mason who was considered the unofficial mayor of Auburn Avenue. Decades later, his grandson — Maynard Jackson Jr. — became Atlanta’s first African American mayor. He served three terms from 1974 to 1982 and from 1990 to 1994.

The Masonic Lodge, at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Hilliard Street, has been the historic epicenter of the Sweet Auburn corridor, serving as home to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the whole time Martin Luther King Jr. was its president.