Dixie Opera House - Cordell, OK
Posted by: 
hamquilter
N 35° 17.482 W 098° 59.277
14S E 501095 N 3905355
The Dixie Opera House gives a small glimpse into early territorial entertainment on the western Plains.
Waymark Code: WM11JFH
Location: Oklahoma, United States
Date Posted: 11/01/2019
Views: 2
This opera house is typical of small town entertainment centers of the early 20th Century. It is a two-story brick building with a flat roof, constructed in 1907. The Dixie Opera House once operated from the second floor of the building. This was common, with the stage and entertainment area on the second floor, and businesses operating from the ground floor.
The building has a large, original wood storefront with a single entry door, flanked by large display windows. The building is currently occupied as Opera House Mall, an antique store. With the absence of any historical marker documenting its operations, we were unable to find anything specific about the Dixie.
Opera Houses were a popular form of entertainment in the early towns of Oklahoma. The following excerpt from the Oklahoma Historical Society's webpage describes how central to a community's social life the opera house was. "The opera house was home to a variety of entertainment, including community dances, graduations, and other civic functions and hosted traveling theatrical companies, vaudeville troops, and operatic companies. A season's entertainment could provide the community with matinee and evening performances, featuring plays recently debuted on Broadway, musical evenings with operatic selections, as well as popular songs, animal acts, pretty girls in chorus lines, and vaudeville companies offering humorous and sometimes bawdy comic relief. The weather in the territories affected the entertainment seasons. Winter was the time for the opera season, and citizens could dress in elegant garments and crowd into semiheated theaters for an evening's entertainment. Summers, however, proved too warm for large indoor gatherings. During steamy territorial summers performances were held outdoors in fenced areas with seats and a stage or screen, commonly known as air domes."