The Oliver Opera House

126 N. Main Street · built 1884–85 · opened October 26, 1885 · the opera house era ends in the record in 1909; the building's later course prints below, where the records differ

The city's first great room was a plow company's gift to itself and to the town. James Oliver and his son J. D. Oliver, of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, built the Oliver Opera House on Main Street, just north of where the J.M.S. Building now stands. Construction was under way by May 6, 1884, and the house cost $200,000 — a sum the History Museum's account sets against the whole of the city's building stock of the day. It opened, on the date the theatre record carries, October 26, 1885. The first performance was the drama Louis XI, with W. E. Sheridan in the lead; Mayor George W. Loughman helped open the house his son's generation would remember as the center of the city's public life.

The room was finished like a palace because it was meant to argue the city's standing. The History Museum's narrative, drawn from the house's own history, describes a marble-and-mahogany vestibule, rich frescoes, and curtains and scenery painted in Chicago by the scenic artists who had done the same work for the Chicago Opera House. It was billed in its day as one of the finest opera houses in the United States. Its bill of fare was the standard one of the American opera-house era, at the full size the railroads allowed: touring plays and opera companies, and — the museum's words — "not just plays but speakers and performers of all types," lecturers, concerts and the whole travelling culture of the nineteenth-century stage, one-night and short stands routed through a manufacturing city that could fill a big room. The house was enough of a civic institution that when the public library first opened in 1889 it opened in a room in the opera house, lent by James Oliver himself — the library's founding is carried in the libraries record; the point here is that the opera house was the city's all-purpose hall as well as its theatre.

The bills themselves survive in bulk in the Dunkle Collection at Saint Mary's: posters, programs, photographs and newspaper clippings for South Bend theatre, 1890–1940. What that archive holds at the level of the individual evening — which companies, which stars, which nights — is the raw material of a fuller telling than this record attempts; the opera house's playing life is documented there rather than in any narrative history, and no season-by-season bill is asserted here beyond what the sources named below carry in print.

The house's end is where the record splits, and the split prints. The university's Building South Bend narrative carries the 1885 building itself forward: converted to a movie theater in 1931, its doors closed in 1953, the auditorium and stage demolished in 1955 and the rest of the building in 1978. The theatre record, in Cinema Treasures' contributed entry, carries a smaller Oliver Theatre — 760 seats — built on the opera house's site and opened in the late summer of 1909, and treats the opera house's own course as ending there. The two accounts agree on the site, the cost, the 1885 opening and a 1953 end to playing on the ground; they differ on whether the 1885 fabric played the whole course or was replaced on its site in 1909. Both stand here as written; the difference is not reconciled in any source reached.

Sources

1. Building South Bend (Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame), Oliver Opera House narrative — builders, cost, conversion to movies 1931, closing 1953, demolitions 1955 and 1978.
2. The History Museum, A Bend in Time, Episode 7, "George Loughman & the Oliver Opera House" — construction under way May 6, 1884; first performance Louis XI with W. E. Sheridan; the Chicago scenic artists; the bill of fare.
3. Cinema Treasures, Oliver Theatre (126 N. Main St.) — the opera house "opened on October 26, 1885"; the 1909 successor house on the site.
4. Saint Mary's College Archives, William W. Dunkle Theatre and Circus Collection — scope and dates, 1890–1940.