The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1853 — 1923
The legitimate stage, in brief: Fort Wayne's theatre record begins with a hall, not a palace. Colerick's Hall, erected by E. F. Colerick in 1853 on the north side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Barr and opened on December 20 of that year, was by the Fort Wayne News's 1907 account of city firsts the town's first theatre; refitted in 1864, it passed to Captain J. B. White and became White's Opera House, was twice gutted by fire, and was finally rebuilt for business. That whole nineteenth-century record — the road companies, the opera-house circuit, the halls — is carried in the Arts section and is cross-referenced here in this one entry. One house of the era belongs to the theatre record proper because it was a purpose-built playhouse: the Temple Theatre, the third-floor theatre of the Masonic Temple at Wayne and Clinton streets, which appears in the 1915 city directory at that corner and served the city's stage and assembly life until the temple was destroyed by fire on February 10, 1923. The Masons rebuilt on East Washington Boulevard; the burned corner's theatrical use ended with the fire. When the movie palaces came, they inherited an audience these halls had trained for sixty years.
Sources:
- Arts section of this history — Colerick's Hall (1853), White's Opera House, and the road-company era, carried there in full and cross-referenced here by agreement; its source line: Fort Wayne News, "First Theatre," February 18, 1907 (via ACGSI).
- University of Saint Francis student history of the Masonic Temple (com584students.pbworks.com, 2010), working from the Sanborn fire insurance maps and the 1915 Fort Wayne directory — the Temple Theatre on the temple's third floor at Wayne and Clinton, and the fire of February 10, 1923 that destroyed the building.