Black diamonds
A burning issue
A spark of life

above: These bare remnants hint at a past when the Tecumseh Threater was a thriving center of community life for the thousands of coal miners and their families living in Shawnee. 

Sunshine filters through tall rectangle windows, illuminating an abandoned opera house wwhere the stage lights last dimmed in the 1940s. A dust-coated curtain remains suspended above the stage, a piano with a tuneless keyboard rests in a corner, and the ticket booth still displays a poster advertising "35¢ couples." They are remnants of a past when the Tecumseh Theater was a thriving center of community life for the thousands of coal miners and their families living in Shawnee, a small town in southeastern Ohio.

When the Tecumseh Theater, formerly known as the Indian Theater, opened on Main Street in 1909, the local population of the town and surrounding communities had swelled to more than 15,000 people. A performance of the popular play Uncle Tom's Cabin or a traveling vaudeville show would have sold as many as 750 tickets. But the auditorium played host to more than theatrical productions. The structure's flat floor made it ideal for basketball games, dances, roller skating, and similar forms of entertainment.

Unlike other small towns at the time, Shawnee boasted two functioning opera houses. Just one block north, the Knights of Labor Opera House, subsequently  purchased by the Knights of Pythias, had opened in 1881.

Shawnee was known as the entertainment capital of the region, according to local historians. Nestled in the Hocking Valley, the town grew with the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s and from the prosperity generated from local coal mines.

Today, those times are a distant memory. Shawnee's coal mines ceased production decades ago. The walls of the Tecumseh Theater are stripped to reveal the structure's wooden skeleton, the floorboards missing  or broken. The original Knights of Labor Opera House is a storeroom for the Hannah Furniture Company. But the two brick opera houses stand tall, sentinels guarding their past.
 

William Condee believes Stuart's Opera house in Nelsonville is a historic and modern opera house ready to resume the central role it played in the culture of southeastern Ohio a century ago. 

Searching for opera houses has become  a consuming research project for William Condee, an associate professor of theater at Ohio University. His journey of discovery is taking him to small towns in southeastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and eastern Kentucky. Like a private investigator, he has sifted through local records, tapped the memories of local residents, and visited dozens of communities rumored to have an opera house history.

Finding these old community theaters can be challenging, Condee says, because their construction and subsequent closure parallel the history of coal mining in Appalachia.

"These opera houses were built during the mining boom in the last quarter of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries for a population that was growing in numbers and affluence," he says. "However, the boom was short-lived. The quality of the coal was not as high as that mined in other areas, and the serious decline of the economy and population started around 1930, coinciding with the nationwide Depression."

Partly in response to the collapse of the region's coal economy, many opera houses closed their doors in the 1920s and 1930s. But these buildings were not torn down or replaced; they simply were boarded up and largely forgotten.

Condee believes the story of these opera houses is woven intricately into the social and cultural history of Appalachia. By unraveling the many types of activities that took place in these theaters, he hopes to enrich society's understanding of the community life shared by miners and their families in small towns before the arrival of movies, television, and radio.

"Frankly, the quality of the performances that took place in these theaters is beside the point," Condee says. "Opera houses were a place for the community to gather and define itself. My approach is not aesthetic. I'm interested in the cultural history that surrounds these buildings."

To the casual observer, finding opera houses in Appalachian coal-mining towns might seem vaguely absurd. Opera usually is associated with "high culture," the preserve of the educated, wealthy upper classes.

In fact, theater historians suggest most of these theaters hosted few opera productions.

"There was a lingering, puritanical prejudice against theater. People thought it was immoral, a waste of time," Condee says. "Opera, in contrast, was considered high culture and therefore respectable. These buildings were called opera houses to avoid the stigma of the title of theater."

The appetite to build opera houses in Appalachia was fed by coal. As the region's economy boomed, new towns emerged  and older communities flourished. Within  50 miles of each other in southeastern Ohio, opera houses were built in Nelsonville, McConnelsville, Gallipolis, Jackson, Zaleski, Chillicothe, Chesterhill, and two in Shawnee.

"Desiring identity and permanence, coal-mining towns built certain elemental structures including schools, churches, town halls, and also opera houses," Condee says. "The opera houses served several needs by providing entertainment for the miners, a gathering site for the townspeople, and a symbol of culture for the town. Building an opera house signaled that a town had Ôarrived' and was well-established."

The civic importance of these opera houses is evidenced by the architecture itself. Opera houses generally were large brick structures, built at the center of town. Many were located in town halls; others were built by fraternal organizations or private individuals. The ground floor often contained storefronts to help attract additional commercial income, and the opera house was located on the second floor. In fraternal buildings, the top floor was reserved for the organization's meeting rooms.
 

Traditional theater historians have tended to focus their studies on the theaters that existed in well-known artistic capitals of America. What happened in regions between New York and Los Angeles often has been considered unimportant. Condee believes this is a mistake, suggesting it is wrong to presume that provincial theater was a cultural dearth. The years between 1866 and 1915 were in fact the "heyday" of live entertainment in America.

"Provincial theater was the way most people experienced theater," Condee says. "They were not traveling to New York City, Chicago, or San Francisco. Theatrical troupes would travel to the small towns where people lived and stage performances in the local theater or opera house. People flocked to these performances 100 years ago."

Old newspaper articles, original programs, playbills, and fliers show performances that included contemporary and classical drama, melodrama, comedy, musicals, vaudeville ; and the occasional opera. From Shakespeare to minstrel shows, there was no shortage of entertainment. 

Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville, Ohio, was a thriving center for live performances in the 1900s. With a seating capacity of 1,200, the theater was equipped with a complete rigging system for flying scenery, a trap door, a device for producing snowstorms, and a thunder sheet ; a large suspended piece of metal that could be shaken for sound effects. Small, spartan dressing rooms existed both in the stage wings and in a room off the stage-right.

Productions often featured famous actors and actresses, an indication of the opera house's prominence. George M. Cohan,  composer of Yankee Doodle Dandy, and comedian and impersonator Al Jolson performed on stage. Elsie Janis, a well-known vaudeville performer, reportedly appeared at the opera house in 1904. "My great-uncle was her accompanist, leading to the intriguing possibility that my uncle Bob Faricy also performed  at Stuart's Opera House," Condee muses. 

Miners were paid not by the hour, day, or week, but by how much coal they mined. Ticket prices at Stuart's Opera House ranged from 25 cents to $1.50, making entertainment affordable for all.

"At the turn of the century, a miner would have to move one-quarter to one-half ton of coal for the cheapest seat or one and one-quarter to two tons for the most expensive seats at Stuart's Opera House," Condee surmises. "Put in a different way, the miner would have to work, on average, about 15 minutes for the cheapest seat, and about an hour for the most expensive."

As he reconstructs the history of individual opera houses, Condee estimates that, at most, only half of the activities in these buildings were what people today would describe as theater.

Community events, high school graduations, recitals, lectures, Sunday school, and dances all took place at the opera house. Often, if the buildings had a flat floor, the auditorium was used for basketball games or roller skating.

"In the era before radio, movies, television, and malls, these buildings were essential and vital," says Condee. "The opera houses really were multipurpose, multiuse community halls rather than theaters."
 

A variety of reasons led to the closure of these thriving community centers in the 1920s and 1930s, among them the collapse of the region's coal industry and subsequent economic decline. In the 1920s, mining companies turned their attention to other parts of the country where the coal streams were easier and cheaper to mine. The fiscal consequences, combined with the Depression of the 1930s, led the region into a dramatic recession from which it still is recovering.

But economics is only part of the story, Condee says. In the 1930s, movie houses started to replace opera houses as sites of popular entertainment. Automobiles and improved roads also made for quick travel to large cities, where a wider variety of entertainment was available. And high schools built gymnasium auditoriums, which were used for basketball, assemblies, graduations, and presentations, replacing the opera house as the home for these significant events.
 

With an eye trained to spot the architectural trappings of these distinctive brick buildings, Condee has discovered more than 100 opera houses in the coal-mining towns of Appalachia, profiled in his forthcoming book tentatively titled Coal and Culture.

Many, like the Tecumseh Theater in Shawnee, have been untouched for decades. Others are being used by private business owners, who find the large open rooms ideal for storage. On a recent visit to Shawnee's Knights of Labor Opera House, now being used for furniture storage, Condee found old pieces of scenery still waiting in the wings for the players to return.

The McConnelsville Opera House  in southeastern Ohio, like a few other theaters, has survived by showing movies and other forms of live entertainment. The original opera house, opened in 1881, was threatened with closure in 1968 when the village government wanted to convert the theater into office space. To fight this move, then owner and manager of the theater Galen Finley ran for mayor on the one-plank platform of "Save the Opera House!" He won the office.

And a precious few, such as Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville, built in 1879, have been restored to their former grandeur. The theater was closed in 1924 and remained forgotten until 1979. Initial efforts to reopen the opera house were halted temporarily after a devastating fire March 24, 1980. Since then, the Hocking Valley Museum of Theatrical History, the nonprofit group that now owns the opera house, has received federal, state, and local funding to restore the building. The theater reopened in 1997 and today hosts live performances and other community events.

"I just think it's great that we have been able to bring this place back to life," says Shirley Seckinger, who has handled the day-to-day operations of Stuart's Opera House and supervised most of the restoration. "We put on five plays this season and the high school also holds graduation exercises here. Now that the lobby is complete, we have hosted two weddings and have plans to start doing dinner theater in the future. We're open for anything and everything."

The key to saving these old theaters lies in the examples being set by Nelsonville and McConnelsville, Condee says.

"It is important that the community continues to have a stake in these buildings,"  he says. "If these spaces can continue to be used to house functions that the community feels is important ; not just theater, but other community events ; the opera house will survive. The future of these theaters rests on rediscovering their past." 

For more information on this project, e-mail William Condee at condee@ohio.edu.

More information on creative projects in the School of Theater  is available online. 

Alice Sachs is a writer and Rick Fatica is a staff  photographer, both for Ohio University News Services and Periodicals.