The Nineteenth-Century Stage at Its Surviving Size: A Hall, No Bills

Row 3 · Minstrelsy and stage comedy, honestly carried

Lead: What survives for the nineteenth-century stage on this ground is a room and a silence around it. Emerick's Opera House is attested for New Carlisle at directory strength only, and its bills are unrecovered — the banked state of the record, carried here under its existing name, GAP-NC5-ART-2, and not re-dug. Against that frame the reachable record was searched for the period's travelling comedy in its period forms — minstrel troupes, comic opera companies, variety bills — in the county histories and the society-facing material: no minstrel performance, no blackface troupe date, no comic bill for a New Carlisle hall returned. Minstrelsy is carried honestly by being neither inflated nor skipped: it was the dominant popular stage comedy of the century in Indiana towns of this size, touring companies played opera houses across the county, and it would be a fabrication to print a New Carlisle date for one without a bill, a newspaper line or a diary behind it — and a second fabrication to print that it never came. The record reached holds neither. What it holds is the hall's name in a directory and nothing that played in it. Printed at exactly that size: a stage existed; its comedy, minstrel or otherwise, is unrecovered, and the settler remains the society's collections and the unopened town papers (see Row 7).

Sources:

1. Banked frame (not re-dug): Emerick's Opera House at directory strength; bills unrecovered — GAP-NC5-ART-2.
3. Town-name searches for minstrel / opera-house performance in New Carlisle, Indiana — no dated performance returned; Ohio and New Harmony, Indiana opera-house returns read and excluded as other places.