Maguire Grand Opera House
50 W. Broadway Street,
Butte,
MT
59701
50 W. Broadway Street,
Butte,
MT
59701
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John Cunningham, writing in the Montana Standard on January 18, 1976, shared a history of Butte theatres. The first projected picture shown in Butte was in 1899 at the Maguire Grand Opera House. It was the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight, which had taken place in Carson City, Nevada on St. Patrick’s Day 1897. The over 90-minute film even has its own page on Internet Movie Data Base. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2012 and a short excerpt can also be seen on YouTube.
The Standard archives note that John Maguire and friends built the Opera House in the 1885. It was destroyed by fire in 1912 and the Leggat Hotel was built on the site.
Contributed by
rpierce
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Recent comments (view all 2 comments)
In the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide there is a “Murray Opera House” in Butte, John Maguire, Mgr. There are no street addresses in this guide, but I assume it’s this theater. It had 1,200 seats; the proscenium opening was 27 feet wide X 28 feet high, and the stage was 35 feet deep. The theater was on the first floor; there were 7 members of the house orchestra. There were 3 daily newspapers and 4 hotels for show folk. Railroads were the Northern Pacfic and the Union Pacific. The 1897 population of Butte was 35,000.
Was this opera house ever called the Butte Opera House?