10/15/2026
While the author of the is article nor the company represented have spoken to our Managing Director, this is a great read about our very special Woodward Opera House🎼🎤🎶 Join us two times this week to see her alive and in action. Thursday October 15th we have EDGAR ALLEN POE and Friday October 16th we have FALL INTO FUN! Hope to see you here to show support of America’s oldest 19th century theater.
Pigeons had the place to themselves. Rain found its way through the roof, winter came in with it, and on either side of the stage two painted women, each canvas about six feet by nine, took the water stains and the bird droppings year after year.
One of them was lifting a flaming torch over a shadowed figure. The other was waking over a green field with the sun behind her head. Nobody was there to see either one.
Downstairs, on Main Street in Mount Vernon, the shops stayed open the whole time. People came in, bought what they needed and went home, and the theater sat right over their heads.
It started with a doctor. Ebenezer Woodward put businesses and offices on the lower floors and saved the top of his building for a hall, so the place never had to live or die on ticket sales alone.
The first event on the books came in December 1851. A Dr. Boynton gave a lecture on electricity, and Mount Vernon came upstairs to hear about the newest wonder of the age.
After that the hall took whatever came through town, from lectures and concerts to vaudeville and minstrel shows. In the 1850s it hosted one of the early stagings of Uncle Tom's Cabin, while the book was still new and the country was still fighting about it.
Over the years it picked up a balcony and the name Woodward Opera House, and somewhere along the way it got those two big paintings by the stage, Dawn and Mid-day, from the studio of Mathias Armbruster, a German scene painter who had settled in Columbus and made his name painting stage scenery.
In the 1890s the first moving pictures anybody in town had seen flickered on a screen in that room. It was a thrill, and it was the beginning of the end.
The movies were what emptied it. Within a generation the pictures had theaters of their own around town, and the old hall up the stairs couldn't compete.
The last event anybody has been able to verify was on February 22, 1921. It was a lecture on new uses of electricity. Seventy years after the hall opened with a talk about electricity, it closed with one.
Everybody tells it as the oldest theater in America. The people who run it are more careful than that. Its own claim is America's oldest authentic 19th century theater still standing, and Philadelphia has a stage that has kept running longer.
What saved it was the boring part of Woodward's plan. The shops and offices below kept paying rent, so nobody ever had a reason to knock the building down, and the hall upstairs turned into a place to put things.
For most of a century nobody put on a show up there. The balcony, the paintings and pieces of the old wallpaper were still in place, with nobody coming up the stairs to use them.
People in Mount Vernon started talking about bringing it back in the 1970s. In 1994 a local arts group got involved, and in 1997 a nonprofit formed to buy the building, fix it and run it.
It took about twenty years and more than twenty-one million dollars. Part of the money came through historic preservation tax credits, so the work had to meet federal preservation standards, and that meant putting things back the way they had been rather than the way that would have been easiest.
Pat Crow, who led the project, went through old newspapers and photographs to get the details right. They tracked down the original wallpaper pattern and reproduced it, and they copied a chandelier from one that had hung there in the 1800s.
The two painted women went to a conservation lab, where a conservator cleaned off the grime, lined the canvases onto new linen, mended the tears and filled in the paint the birds and the water had taken. Then they came home and went back up on either side of the stage.
The grand reopening came on February 9, 2019, and Kathy Mattea sang. The room holds about five hundred people now, and they go up to it the way people did in 1851, in off the street and past the shops, into a room generations of shoppers had walked under without ever seeing.
Somewhere downstairs, right this minute, somebody is eating dinner with no idea there's a balcony over their head. Then the music starts.
What was the first live show you ever saw, and who sat next to you?
Real photograph, not AI. Photo: Ohio Redevelopment Projects (ODSA), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (text added).
