An Opera House in Red Cloud, NE

Opera and play houses in small town America are found throughout the country, many of them built in the 1800’s - this one from 1885. Not just for staging operas or plays by traveling companies, they were used much like the town halls of today, for the social and cultural life of the town. The one in Red Cloud was restored in 2003 mainly through the vision and fund raising efforts of a doctor’s wife, Mildred Bennett, and other volunteers.

The ground floor (known as the first floor in the U.S., which always bothers me when I’m going down in a lift (elevator) because I’m always looking for a G instead of 1st) This building was once a large hardware store. On the upper level is the opera house, still much in use today. In the restrooms (where we don’t go to rest) are two evacuation signs, one for fire and the other which outlines a plan of how to reach safety in the event of a tornado!

This unique building and several others in the town, belong to the Willa Cather Foundation, an institution set up to commemorate the life and works of the author. The ground floor of the opera house contains a bookstore dedicated to this world famous author, who is also a Pulitzer prize winner. She is regarded as one of America’s best known classical authors. I’d never heard of her until we reached Nebraska, and read a historic roadside marker set amongst the beautiful prairie grasses of the country she frequently wrote about. It was at the same place I heard the unusual bird song of the meadowlark, Nebraska’s state bird.

Howard and I toured several of

the buildings that she was associated with apart from the Opera House; her childhood home and the ornate Garber Bank (photos), with a wonderful tour guide called Dorothy, who was a very young looking 84 year old and a volunteer at the Foundation. Having read one of Cather’s books, she wrote vivid, detailed descriptions of the rooms and people and affairs during the time that she lived there. She must have had a wonderful memory, because she was just nine when her family moved to Red Cloud, which was the setting of many of her books. It was an amazing experience for me to have stood in her attic bedroom with the furnishings exactly as she described it in one of her books, “The Song of the Lark”.

We so enjoy stopping by these small towns and have visited a number of them during the past two years. Many of them still have trolley buses (this town used to have one) such as those in Guthrie in Oklahoma, Jacksonville in Oregon and Eureka Springs in Arkansas. It’s a great way to tour the towns and learn about the history, usually from well-informed tour guides.