The halls: Bender's Hall, and the opera house that was

ARTS-7 DUG AT ATTESTATION STRENGTH · GAP-W-ART-1 ANSWERED IN PART

Walkerton had an opera house, and the record now names it: the town's citizens met in "Hudelmyer's opera house" in March 1910 to found the cut-glass company, and a place that can host a stock-selling town meeting is a working hall, not a rumor. The Hudelmyer name is township-old — Samuel Hudelmyer stood constable of Lincoln Township in 1867, in Chapman's first-election roster — and the hall that bore the family name was standing and in civic use by 1910, in the line of the town's earlier room: Bender's Hall, the upper story of Jacob Bender's fine brick store building on the 1880 street, which Chapman prints alongside the Odd Fellows hall in the same building — the town's theater, meeting room, and lodge floor in one brick pile. J. B. Turner belongs to this roll at his true size: the Chapman sketchbook's "renowned theatrical proprietor and performer," born at Utica in 1828, who toured combinations from 1848 to 1880, managed the Emma Leland troupe in 1880, and kept his residence in Walkerton — a professional of the road who chose this town to live in, distinct from Thompson Turner the postmaster and glass-company committeeman, with whom he shares only a surname. What remains open is the opera house as a building: its block, its builder, and its end stand for the Sanborn fire-insurance run to fix (DF-W-69), and the gap prints with that settler named.

Principal sources: WAHS Central Cut Glass exhibit (the March 1910 meeting "in Hudelmyer's opera house"); Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter and biographical sketches (Bender's Hall; Samuel Hudelmyer; J. B. Turner).