My good friend, Mike Engen, told me that on one occasion when he was working for Rottles in the 1970s, he and a co-worker had to make a run to a store room on the upper floor of the JC Penney building across Main Street to fetch an item.

That room held in its nooks and crannies, he recalled, a number of dusty curiosities from Auburn, some dating to the first decades of the 20th Century.

“We found some weird things that nobody could really explain, nobody seemed to know anything about it. Banners with odd symbols, what we thought were relics of fraternal or Elks-like organizations,” Engen recalled.

Then from a closet jumped one of the skeletons in Auburn’s history: what appeared to be a Ku Klux Klan robe, a garment that for him would shine a light on a seldom explored episode in the city’s life.

That room, known for decades as Fraternal Hall, was where members of the Imperial Knights of the Ku Klu Klan met in their only year or two in Auburn, circa 1922-1923. The city was part of the organization’s wider efforts to recruit members and widen its power base in Washington state and the West Coast.

Nationwide, the Klan achieved its highest membership and presence after the release of DW Griffith’s overtly racist film, “Birth of a Nation,” in 1915. And after the First World War, the Klan was avid to ensure that Black men returning from the fields of battle in countries where they were treated as human beings knew where they ranked in the country where they were born.

But the Klan did not limit its hatred to Black folk — it had plenty to spare for Catholics and Jews and immigrants of all stripes.

“We are joined together to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for the preservation of the American ideals and all a white man holds dear,” declared Judge John Jeffries, imperial lecturer for the Klan before an audience at Fraternal Hall in the spring of 1923. “…We are for prohibition, and we are against the influx of foreign immigration that is tending to break down what the American people have built up.”

The first indication of the order’s presence in this city surfaced in the Auburn Globe-Republican in the winter of 1922, in the form of a small, front-page article noting “rumors” that efforts appeared to be underway to recruit new members in Auburn.

And rumors they continued to be until the paper was able to verify that Klan members had indeed spoken to highly placed persons in the community to gauge their interest.

Still, as of Feb. 9, 1923, nothing official.

“Many members of Klan here, but no official branch,” a Globe-Republican headline declared.

The article underneath that headline noted that various branches of the Klan in Washington state, including branches in the nearby cities of Sumner, Kent and Puyallup, were protesting laws under consideration at the time to bar them from forming branches in the state. All existing branches were represented by letters of protest to the state legislature, but Auburn was not among the cities listed as “centers of Klan activities.”

Then on Friday, March 16, 1923, this headline: “More than Three Hundred to Take Oath in Woods near Auburn is Rumour.”

“Silently, but none the less certainly, the sinister form of the Hooded Klan is casting its shadow over the entire White River Valley,” the paper reported. “Any information received concerning the activities of the Ku Klux Klan must necessarily come through ‘unofficial channels,’ but persistent rumors are afloat to the effect that a class numbering more than 300 candidates from this valley is scheduled to take the oath, receive initiation ceremonies and become members of the secret organization some time next week.”

By May 11, 1923, the Klan surfaced at Auburn City Hall. The headline: “Klan to become active. Representatives Suggest Possibility of sending Horsemen through streets.”

“That the powerful and rapidly growing organization known as the Ku Klux Klan is contemplating an active, open campaign for members in Auburn was revealed Wednesday when representatives of the Klan appeared at the city hall seeking information relative to restrictions on street demonstrations,” the paper reported. “W.K. Romans of Auburn, accompanied by an official of the Seattle branch of the Klan organization, inquired of City Clerk Arthur C. Ballard whether there was any legislation in effect prohibiting a uniformed horseman parading through the streets of Auburn — presumably in the hooded outfit of a Ku Klux Klan member — for the purpose of advertising a meeting to be held here.”

An examination of city ordinances revealed no such regulation affecting a demonstration of this kind, the paper reported, although Mr. Ballard expressed the belief that city officials might act “in the event that demonstrations as the men proposed were constructed to be a means of inciting disorder.”

Later, Fred Klise, local leader of the now not-so-secret order, presented a $50 check to the park fund on behalf of a tourist group, its first public step to curry favor with the local community.

No such demonstration is mentioned in the news archives, and the Auburn Reporter was unable to find additional information about the Klan’s efforts in Auburn.

But in Auburn, as elsewhere in the state, the Klan recruitment drive mainly fizzled, and the hate organization abandoned its efforts here by the following year.

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Robert Whale can be reached at rwhale@soundpublishing.com.