The Nineteenth-Century Stage and the Vaudeville Bills — Two Tests

Nineteenth century – 1920s · Chapman (1880); Howard; the Tribune and Standard-shaped carriers reached in this section

No minstrel show, no nineteenth-century stage bill and no vaudeville bill naming Lakeville was found in any carrier reached — printed at surviving size, which is a stated negative, neither inflated nor skipped. The nineteenth-century test runs at the record's own scale: Chapman's 1880 census of the village enumerates its businesses — two country stores, a drug and hardware store, a hotel, shops, mills, and no saloon keeper (Wineries & Distilleries lk-win-saloons) — and names no theatre, hall of performance, opera house or travelling-show stand; Howard's township course adds no stage. A town incorporated in 1902 whose performance room, when one finally stands in the record, is a school auditorium of 1931 (Culture lk-cul-kids) had no nineteenth-century house for a bill to play in, and no minstrelsy notice naming this ground was returned by the searches run. The item prints honestly at that size: minstrelsy was the century's common travelling form and its absence from this town's reached record is a finding about the record, stated as such, with the Tribune and Standard archives as its settlers. The vaudeville test follows the same course a generation later: no vaudeville bill, house, or circuit stop naming Lakeville, Indiana stands in any carrier reached — the Orpheum and Palace bills of the pattern are South Bend houses playing South Bend, and no bill is borrowed across the line. Lakeville's stage history, at the evidence reached, begins with the school room of 1931 and the programmes that do not survive by name (the named gap at lk-cul-kids), and this article is its early chapter: a tested blank, printed whole.