The Loyal Order of Moose is a fraternal and service organization founded in 1888 and headquartered in Mooseheart, Illinois. Moose International supports the operation of Mooseheart Child City & School, a community for children and teens in need, located west of Chicago; and Moosehaven, a retirement community for its members near Jacksonville, Florida. Additionally, the Moose organization conducts numerous sports and recreational programs, in local Lodge/Chapter facilities called either Moose Family Centers or Activity Centers, in the majority of 44 State and Provincial Associations, and on a fraternity-wide basis. There is also a Loyal Order of Moose in Britain. These organizations together make up the Moose International. History The Loyal Order of Moose was founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in the spring of 1888 by Dr. John Henry Wilson. Originally intended purely as a men's social club, lodges were soon founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and Crawfordsville and Frankfort, Indiana. The early order was not prosperous. Dr. Wilson himself was dissatisfied and left the order of the Moose before the turn of the century. When Albert C. Stevens was compiling his Cyclopedia of Fraternities in the late 1890s, he was unable to ascertain whether it was still in existence. In the fall of 1906 the Order had only the two Indiana lodges remaining. On October 27 of that year James J. Davis became the 247th member of the Order. Davis was a Welsh immigrant who had come to the US as a youth and worked as an iron puddler in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and an active labor organizer (he later became Secretary of Labor in the Harding administration). He saw the Order as a way to provide a social safety net for a working class membership, using a low annual membership fee of $10–$15 (equivalent to $–$ in ). After giving a rousing address to the seven delegates of the 1906 Moose national convention, he was appointed "Supreme Organizer" of the Order. Davis and a group of organizers set out to recruit members and establish lodges throughout the US and Canada. He was quite successful, and the Order grew to nearly half a million members in 1,000 lodges by 1912. Racial discrimination Old National Moose Lodge bylaws restricted membership in this men's club to Caucasians. In 1972, K. Leroy Irvis, an African-American member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, was invited to visit a lodge in Harrisburg