Grand Opera House
216-220 W. Main Street,
Lebanon,
IN
46052
216-220 W. Main Street,
Lebanon,
IN
46052
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The Grand Opera House in Lebanon is listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Theatrical Guide. J.C. Brown was Mgr. No seating capacity given. Tickets 25 cents to 75 cents. Theatre on second floor. The proscenium opening was 28 feet wide X 30 feet high; the stage was 38 feet deep. There were 8 musicians in the house orchestra. The population of Lebanon was 6,000.
The Grand Opera House was still standing at least a late as 1979, when an article about it appeared in the October issue of Boone Magazine (PDF here), though it had not been used as a theater since 1918. It was quite a large theater, with 700 seats on the main floor and 300 in the gallery, with additional seating for 32 in the side boxes. The stage was 38 feet deep and 60 feet wide. I’ve been unable to discover to what extent movies were presented at the Grand, but its inclusion in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory would have been unlikely had they not been shown fairly often.
Here is an item about Brown’s Grand Opera House from the August 17, 1886 issue of The Indianapolis Journal:
Architect Robert Platt Daggett began practicing at Indianapolis in 1868, and the firm he established with junior partner James B. Lizius in 1880, R. P. Daggett & Company, continued operation after his death in 1915, run first by his son Robert Frost Daggett and then by his grandson Robert Frost Daggett Jr. until the latter’s retirement in 1977. The firm was one of the city’s most prolific, but unfortunately very little of its early work has survived.View of the auditorium here: http://www.trestlewood.com/photo/6498/
The 1914-15 Gus Hill guide gives a capacity of 900. From other photos, the building seems to have survived until at least the mid-‘70s. The opera house was apparently opened August 14, 1886.