Twin City Opera House Tunnels - McConnelsville, OH
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silverquill
N 39° 38.935 W 081° 51.204
17S E 426781 N 4389139
Opened in 1892, the Twin City Opera House in the heart of McConnelsville, Ohio, was designed by H.C. Lindsay with a network of tunnels and rooms underneath, reputed to have been used as escape routes on the underground railroad.
Waymark Code: WM5M8V
Location: Ohio, United States
Date Posted: 01/20/2009
Views: 17
The Twin City Opera House was designed by H. C. Lindsay, an architect from Zanesville, Ohio. The building was to be three stories high, and cost about $16,000. The Town Hall would have a tower that would rise 108 feet above the sidewalks of McConnelsville. The third floor would feature a grand ballroom running the complete 63 foot width of the building.
Ground was broken for the project on Monday, October 20, 1889.
Some of H.C. Lindsay’s design principles were considered quite revolutionary. The Opera House’s ground floor auditorium was uncommon in the late 1800s, and it is one of the last remaining theaters of its period with that feature. The stage floor is “raked” or sloped by 3°, to allow the audience’s front rows to see the performers’ feet. The auditorium’s central “echo dome” contributes to the theater’s nearly perfect acoustics. Lines spoken from the rear of the stage can be heard perfectly throughout the room.
The second floor would house the offices for the town government.
The formal opening was held Saturday, May 28, 1892. The opening was to be a grand affair. The program for the evening was the Arion Opera Company’s performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.” The cast, crew and orchestra numbered nearly one-hundred. All of the eight-hundred seats that were then available in the auditorium were sold. Railway excursions had been arranged from neighboring towns to bring the cultured and the curious.
Over the years, the Opera House has accommodated an endless variety of performers and celebrities. Fire and brimstone evangelist Reverend Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan, and Senator Albert Beveridge spoke here. High School commencements and local minstrel shows were staged here. But, most spectacular were the traveling shows. Often arriving by train, the traveling shows brought lavish productions to McConnelsville.
In 1913 the theater was outfitted with a permanent system for showing silent films. A projection booth was partitioned off in the back of the balcony or “gallery” as it was known then, and a screen was added to the stage. The best seats in the house were those in the “Parquet Circle,” which are those in the front rows of the center section on the ground floor. These premium seats could cost as much as 20 cents, while those in the “peanut gallery” were a nickel.
The first sound pictures came to the Opera House in 1930, using the RCA photophone system. This cumbersome system involved synchronizing 78 RPM records with the film. The true “talkies” did not arrive in McConnelsville until 1936. The only time in its history that the Opera House briefly closed its doors to the public, was for the installation of the sound projectors and the renovation of the auditorium. It was at that time the old projection booth was removed from the balcony, and the present booth was created above the second floor mezzanine, and behind the balcony. The theater continues to screen recently released films, as it has done nearly every weekend since 1936.
Perhaps nothing in the theater is more interesting, or mysterious, than its tunnels. For generations, the story has been told that the tunnels were once used to conceal the movements of escaped slaves, who were fleeing the south. They were said to have linked the building that once stood on the Opera House foundation to other locations in the village, and ultimately to the banks of the Muskingum River.
From the Twin Theater Web Site (
visit link)