The Opera House Came Before the Hospital

A mining camp is a temporary thing and everybody in it knows so. The ore runs out, the men leave, and the buildings are worth more as lumber somewhere else. Everything is built to be abandoned.

Except the opera house.

Five towns that did it

Thompson's went up in Pioche, Nevada in 1873 — a wooden hall in a town so violent that the local claim, repeated for a century and never quite verified, is that seventy-two men were buried on Boot Hill before anybody died of natural causes. Pioche had silver, gunmen, and a courthouse it could not pay for. It built a theatre.

Piper's in Virginia City has been built three times, because fire took the first two and they put it up again. Eureka's opera house opened in 1880 in a town of smelters. Central City's in Colorado dates from 1878, paid for by subscription from miners and shopkeepers. And the Homestake Opera House in Lead, South Dakota was a gift from the mining company itself — the largest and latest of them, finished in 1914, with a swimming pool and a library attached.

Every one of these towns has a population now measured in hundreds or low thousands. Every one of them, at the moment of building, believed it was about to become a city.

What a theatre is for

Not entertainment, or not only. A travelling company could play in a saloon, and often did.

An opera house is a statement about the future. It says: we intend to be here in thirty years, we expect to have wives and daughters here, and we are the kind of place where a touring production from San Francisco would consider stopping. It is a building whose entire function is to be too permanent for the circumstances that produced it.

Which is why they went up so early. A hospital is what you build when you admit people are going to be hurt here for a long time. An opera house is what you build when you are still telling yourself a different story.

The ones that were right

Some of the bets paid. Lexington's opera house is in a city. Boothbay Harbor kept its. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House at Derby Line straddles the Canadian border, with the stage in one country and most of the seats in the other, and it is still open because the town on both sides stayed.

And the Twin City Opera House in McConnelsville, Ohio is still running, though it now does a considerable trade in ghost tours — which is its own kind of survival, and not the one the builders had in mind.

The ones that were wrong

Pioche's silver gave out. Eureka's smelters closed. Central City emptied and came back as a casino town, which is a stranger fate than closing.

The buildings outlasted the argument for them. That is the thing worth driving to see: not a restored theatre, but a room built by people who were sure, and were not right, and left the evidence standing in a town of eight hundred people.

Thompson's opens by arrangement rather than on a schedule. Ring ahead, and somebody will let you in.