Talk about timing.

Burned out of its third-floor downtown lodge rooms in a huge early-morning fire in late March 1961, all that members of Nashua’s burgeoning Lodge of Elks had to do was drive about three miles south and push a bunch of symbolic shovels into the ground, and voila! Their brand new home was on its way to becoming reality.

It was a year of transition for the now 116-year-old Nashua Lodge 720, Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, and now, nearly 56 years later, the storied fraternal organization is once again settling into a new home, having bid farewell a couple of months ago to their quarters at 120 Daniel Webster Highway.

They’ve moved into space at 12 Murphy Drive formerly occupied by the relatively short-lived Napa East Wine Bar & Restaurant, and before that, by one of Teradyne Inc.’s manufacturing plants.

"We gutted a lot of the interior, but kept the bar and put in a smoking room," said longtime Elk Dave Lozeau, who headed up the relocation project.

The name "smoking room" apparently doesn’t do it justice: Lozeau said it’s a $82,000 space that local HVAC contractor J. Lawrence Hall "did a great job" of designing and outfitting.

As for the future of 120 Daniel Webster, it looks like from the city’s property records database that the neighboring auto dealership bought the 1.7 acre lot with plans to take down the old lodge and build a new showroom, or expand an existing one.

Regardless, the focus for local Elks is now on the Saturday, Jan. 28 event that will make 12 Murphy Drive, Unit 3, their official home going forward.

Tradition holds that the event, the time-honored acceptance and dedication ceremony, is a members-only event involving dozens of Elks from lodges throughout the region, including some high-ranking state and regional leaders.

I knew the moment I decided this is a great time to look back at the history of Nashua Lodge 720 that my first call would be to the inimitable Albert W. Savage, going into his 66th year as an Elk and still able to rattle off dates, events, anecdotes and members’ names like he’s reading a book.

Maybe that’s because Al did in fact write the book, the 144-page one chock full of Elks history that he researched for more than two years and had published in time for the Nashua Lodge’s centennial anniversary in 2001.

Savage also happens to be a nephew of one of the men who brought Elkdom to Nashua, an initiative that began gathering steam just before the turn of the 20th century. The organization we know today as the Nashua Lodge of Elks, Al tells me, grew out of a tiny, 30-member club called the Entre Nous Social Club (French for "amongst ourselves").

For some reason, they capped membership at 30, bringing in new members only when a current member moved away or died. They weren’t a very high-profile group, their calendar made up mostly of social gatherings and dances for members and guests.

Meanwhile, Savage’s uncle, Charles Lee, a Nashua man who had joined the Lowell Elks lodge because none existed in Nashua, noticed how much the Elks and the Entre Nous club had in common, and got an idea.

"He said, ‘we believe in a lot of the same things,’ something like that, and they took a vote," Al Savage said of the Entre Nous membership. The idea took; the vote passed, and a Nashua Elks lodge was born.

Chartered in the summer of 1901, the fledgling Nashua Lodge of Elks absorbed many Entre Nous members, holding meetings in that club’s space in the old Barker Hall at Main and Water streets. The 30-member limit gone, rolls swelled rapidly, prompting the Elks to move into larger quarters; they chose the old O’Donnell Hall off High Street and moved in February 1903.

It didn’t take long for space to become an issue again, and come 1910 the Elks jumped into action when the entire third floor of the former Beasom Block at Main and Factory streets became available.

Old-timers will remember that small, but iconic, lighted "Elks" sign bolted to the Beasom building’s facade; how many of us would give anything to have that on the wall of our man cave? They’ll also remember the bedlam that broke out downtown around midnight one late March evening; Al Savage will never forget it.

"We had a meeting that night, some of us stayed around after to play cards," he remembers. "All of a sudden there was pounding on the door, we said who the heck is banging like that at this time of night?"

A wide-eyed police officer greeted whomever opened the door.

"Get the hell out of here, the place is on fire!’?" Savage recalled the cop hollering. "We put down our cards, grabbed what we could and got the hell out," he said.

And not a moment too soon: "Just as we got (out) onto Main street we looked up, flames were coming out of the windows," he said.

Luckily, or perhaps due to a conscientious leadership, the Elks had been scoping out space for a new home for a good two years. By then it had been narrowed to three possibilities: Rehabbing the fire-stricken space; moving to the former Universalist Church at Main and East Pearl streets, or build anew down on Daniel Webster Highway.

The kind folks at Temple Beth Abraham, which at the time was at Lock and Cross streets, offered the Elks space to meet and conduct their activities until their new digs were ready. Savage remembers the Daniel Webster Highway groundbreaking taking place April 1, just three days after the fire. Come November, the new lodge was ready for occupancy.

Savage recalls, sort of whimsically, that the Elks had had an option on a whole bunch of land surrounding the parcel they ultimately bought and built on.

"We could have bought that whole area for $55,000," he said.

Today, the sprawling New England Automotive Village occupies the land Savage referred to as "that whole area."

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-1256, dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com or @Telegraph_DeanS.