A few days ago I was sorting through some old pictures from my time in Michigan and I came across a picture, the symbol of the Free Masons:







I remember running into Masons all the time in Detroit and suburbs of Detroit and thinking it was a bit odd for me to not have heard of them before that point (2006-2008). I checked out a few of their resources online and came across their membership statistics.





It turns out that Michigan is one of the larger states with their Freemason population in 2012 exceeding 34,000. Unfortunately, the group has come on rough times in the last several decades and membership has fallen:





Admission:



I’m not really that curious about Freemasonry. Mainly I wanted to play around with CartoDB and use ggthemes on R and this was a perfect opportunity.



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