Justus Henry Rathbone was born on October 29, 1839 in the town of Deerfield, Oneida County, New York. He was descended from John Rathbone, one of the purchasers of Block Island in 1660, who became a freeman of Rhode Island in 1664. The son of Justus Hull Rathbone, a Utica lawyer, and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth (Dwight), the boy was named Henry Edwin Dwight, but at the age of ten changed his name to Justus Henry.
After a schooling received in academies in New York State and perhaps a brief period at Madison (now Colgate) University, he went west at the age of nineteen, and during the winter of 1858-59 taught school at Eagle Harbor in the Michigan copper region.
From January to July 1863 he was in the Federal hospital service as a citizen nurse, stationed at Cuyler General Hospital, Germantown, Pennsylvania; from July 1863 until nearly the end of the war he served as a hospital steward in Washington, D. C. He was subsequently employed as a clerk in the Treasury Department, 1865-69; by the Independent News Company of Boston and New York, 1869-73; and as a clerk in the War Department from 1874 until his death.
In 1863, while at the hospital in Germantown, Rathbone first disclosed the fact that he had drawn up a ritual for a fraternal order which should include the three ranks of page, esquire, and knight. It had been suggested to him by John Banim's play, Damon and Pythias, with its lesson of friendship even in the face of death. The chief steward of the hospital, Robert Allen Champion, indorsed Rathbone's idea and advised that when a favorable opportunity arrived an attempt should be made to establish the order.
Shortly afterward both were transferred to Washington and, with three other government clerks, on Feburary 19, 1864, they organized Washington Lodge, No. 1, the mother lodge of the Order of Knights of Pythias. Its declared purpose was "to disseminate the great principles of friendship, charity, and benevolence"; its cardinal principles, "Toleration in religion, obedience to law, and loyalty to government. " Although it was originally planned as an order of Government clerks, "nothing of a political or sectarian character" was to be "permitted within its portals. " At the time, when the guns of war were still echoing, Rathbone's project was received as an effort to allay the feelings engendered by sectional strife, and to help restore peace, harmony, and mutual prosperity.
He was elected "worthy chancellor" of Washington Lodge which, by the end of 1864, had fifty-two members, but he was not honored with the position of grand chancellor of the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia, which was formed during the same year. The idea had soon gone beyond the conception of the founder, who was innocent of unworthy ambition or scheming and always ready to step aside for what he deemed best for the Order. Others seized the opportunities presented by the organization, and, for a time, personal aims nearly wrecked the fraternal structure, which, however, eventually took its place with other benevolent institutions.
In May 1868 a supreme lodge was formed, with representatives from five grand lodges; in 1877 the endowment rank, an insurance branch, was incorporated, and the next year, the Uniform Rank, a semi-military branch, was added. By 1932 the fraternity had a membership of 501, 104.
In 1877 Rathbone was made Supreme Lecturer of the Order - a position created for him. The Silver Anniversary celebration in 1889 found him broken in health. The death of his wife, in 1887, and other sorrows and disappointments, had overwhelmed him, and he asked the editor of The Pythian Knight to write for him the Anniversary Address, which he managed to deliver on Feburary 19, 1889. He died at Lima, Ohio, honored and beloved, and officially designated as the founder of the Order, on December 9 of the same year. He was buried at Utica, New York, where in 1892 a monument was erected to his memory.
On August 11, 1862, Rathbone married Emma Louisa Sanger of Utica, who bore him five children, of whom only two daughters lived to maturity.
