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| Bangor, ME, picture postcard, undated. |
The other day, my husband forwarded me the above lovely
postcard of historic Bangor, Me, with a note: “Why is there an Opera House in
every city and village in Maine?” It’s quite remarkable. I’ve traveled
extensively in small-town America, and no place I’ve been has the number of
preserved Opera Houses as are found here.
From the Civil War until the advent of the Talkies in the late 1920s,
the Opera House was a fixture of American small town life. These community
meeting houses had little, if anything, to do with actual opera; they were
simply the local theater and town meeting hall. “Opera” was just a more respectable
term than “theater.”
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| Stonington Opera House, By Choess - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17557400 |
A quick search of the National Register of Historic Places
shows five Opera Houses in Maine, a vast underrepresentation of the selection
at hand. Stonington’s
is perhaps the most prominent, an uncompromising block of a building set on an
equal block of granite above the town pier. It was built in 1912, and still has
an asbestos-lined projection booth, from the days when nitrate-based film
regularly caught fire. The asbestos was appropriate; the first Opera House had
burned to the ground in 1910.
The Island Falls
Opera House was built in 1894, on land whose deed prohibited the sale of
alcohol. That didn’t stop it from becoming a major entertainment space. How
could tiny Island Falls support an Opera House? Its population in 1920 was exactly
twice what it is today. The hall is now vacant.
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| Pythian Opera House, Boothbay, By Magicpiano - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35548577 |
Bangor’s Opera House was built in 1920. It was in the very
trendy Egyptian Revival craze that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's
tomb by Howard Carter. Although it’s not on
the National Register, it continues in use as a theater, most notably as the
home of the Penobscot
Theatre Company.
At the turn of the century, some Opera Houses were being
built as part of multi-purpose facilities, combining town offices and meeting
rooms. Camden’s was constructed on this model after a large fire swept through
downtown in the late autumn of 1892. Among the destroyed buildings were the
town hall, fraternal order meeting rooms and the original opera house. Why not
roll them into one unit? Waterville’s Opera House, which was started in 1898, was built along the same lines, as was the Pythian Opera House,
built in 1894 in Boothbay Harbor.
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| Camden Opera House, By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States - Camden,
Maine Uploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29697947 |
That brings me to the one around the corner from me, the Rockport Opera House. Built in
1892 and originally called the Town Hall, it too was designed as a multipurpose
building. After a varied and colorful career as a library, bowling alley,
basketball court, roller skating rink, YMCA, public theater and town hall, it
was rescued by the Rockport Garden Club in the 1970s. A second renovation
project in the 1990s brought it up to its current condition.
Why have all these Opera Houses survived? Maine has not been
overrun by suburban development as have most other states. That means that much
of its history remains writ large along the roadsides. And Mainers really are
thrifty.
Part of this, also, is based on what historians once called
the “New England Conscience.”
“Other sections of the country and other cultures of the
world exhibit, I have no doubt, scores of conscientious men and women; only in
New England is there a Conscience so standardized that it must be capitalized.
As John Quincy Adams succinctly put it, ‘New England was the colony of
Conscience,’” wrote historian Perry Miller.
That’s been dissipated in the modern age, but New Englanders
are still more inclined to sit still and be talked at than most people. An
Opera House is a fine place in which to do so.
