Baum's Opera House

My presentation at Oz Con International, July 2024.

At Oz Con International in July 2024, I gave a presentation on Baum’s Opera House. That’s the theatre in Richburg, New York, that L. Frank Baum co-managed with his uncle John Wesley Baum for ten weeks in 1881-82.

For decades, a lot of false information has accumulated about Baum’s early theatrical career. Falsities include the idea that L. Frank Baum’s father gave Baum “a string of opera houses,” that L. Frank Baum produced his own plays at Baum’s Opera House, and that L. Frank Baum ever belonged to a “Shakespearean troupe” of actors. I intended my groundbreaking presentation to blast away many of the false accretions—those pesky Hanging Munchkins—and present the truth about Baum’s Opera House.

But I wanted to present more than that. I wanted to identify the spot where Baum’s Opera House once stood.

Early in the morning of March 8, 1882, Baum’s Opera House burned beyond repair, thus ending Baum’s theatre management career. The building was never rebuilt and its location was lost. 

Newspaper ads for the theatre’s productions never included an address. Baum’s 1881-82 correspondence provides no street address for his theatre. Even the letterhead on Baum’s Opera House stationery lacks a street address. I doubt the theatre ever had an official address. One wouldn’t have been necessary for the single legitimate theatre in the small village of Richburg in the early 1880s.

Baum's letterhead as manager of Baum's Opera House.

Past historians have assumed that Richburg’s second theatre—named Brown’s Opera House—was built on the same spot where Baum’s Opera House stood. My research proved that assumption incorrect.

Newspaper reports from 1881-82 indicate the theatre’s proximity to other vanished landmarks, but that info provides only a general location, not a specific one.

The red rectangle shows my original best guess for the theatre's location.

I contacted Melanie Johnston of the Richburg-Wirt Historical Society, who provided further theatre location clues. Combining all my gathered information, I came up with a guess for the location—an educated guess, but a guess, nonetheless. That’s what I offered in my Oz Con International presentation last July.

Several months later, I visited Richburg, New York, in person for the first time. On the evening of October 6, at the Richburg-Wirt Historical Society, I gave my Baum’s Opera House presentation, slightly revised. I included new information pertinent to residents of the Richburg area and removed references aimed primarily at Oz fans. I again presented my best guess for the theatre’s location. Still, it remained a guess.

About to give my presentation in Richburg.

Melanie Johnston of the Richburg-Wirt Historical Society arranged my appearance and attended. I thanked her again for the information she’d provided. As the audience listened, she and I briefly discussed problems with determining the location of Baum’s Opera House.

After my presentation, Melanie and her husband showed my partner, theatre historian David Maxine, and me around the cozy Richburg-Wirt Historical Society museum. David spotted on one wall a large old photograph of Richburg in its oil boom days, tall derricks sprouting across the landscape. Across the bottom of the photo appeared words clearly written on the original negative: March 1882. That’s the month Baum’s Opera House burned. Was the photo taken before or after the fire? We studied the photo to find Baum’s Opera House or its remains. We couldn’t, and the hour was growing late, so David took phone photos of the Richburg photo on the wall.

Next morning, during daylight, David and I visited the general area where Baum’s Opera House once stood. After more than one hundred and forty years, we didn’t expect to find any remains of Baum’s theatre, but we wanted to examine the spot of my best guess. We walked up and down the sidewalks and street, staring around, debating. We compared what we saw to David’s phone shots of the old Richburg photo from March 1882. In the photo, some distance to the right of my location guess, I recognized a house that still stands today. To the left of that house in the photo, David noticed a puzzling area, unlike anything else in the photo. Neither of us could figure out what it pictured, until David suggested it showed the burned remains of a building.

A portion of a photograph of Richburg, New York, clearly marked March 1882. The area within the white rectangle is enlarged in the image immediately below.

 

Enlargement of portion of the Richburg photograph above. The large building on the left is the Academy, sitting at the far edge of Academy Park. The fully visible building in the upper right still stands today. What appear to be the fire-ravaged remains of a large building stand just left of center, including a substantial portion of the damaged front facade and a dark doorway at the facade's bottom center. Park Row runs from center of the photo toward the bottom right corner.

Eureka! (And I don’t mean the kitten.) We’d found the location of Baum’s Opera House!

We compared the location of the burned remains to our current reality. There stood a residential house, 115 Griffin, and its detached garage, across the street from Bolivar-Richburg Elementary School.

I no longer had to guess. Baum’s Opera House stood in Richburg, New York, on the northwest side of Griffin Street where Park Row "T"s into Griffin, one block northwest of Main Street (New York State Route 275).

The location of Baum's Opera House on Griffin Street in Richburg, New York. The building that stands just past the bend in Griffin Street is also visible in the March 1882 photo of Richburg.

Imagine yourself in Richburg, New York, on a frosty evening in late December 1881, turning the corner from Main Street into Park Row. As you stroll along, Academy Park lies on your left, lined at the street with an evenly spaced row of trees, their leafless branches spreading high against the evening sky. From ahead, at the end of the street, float the growing strains of a band playing the pre-show concert in front of Baum’s Opera House, a large wooden clapboard building, newly erected. A tall young man, well-dressed, with neatly combed brown hair and a handle-bar mustache, steps out of the theatre’s front door. It’s Louis F. Baum, the theatre’s manager. He beckons to the gathering crowd. Tonight’s show starts soon. Don’t miss it!

[For more about L. Frank Baum's theatrical career, see David Maxine's blog VintageBroadway.com]

Copyright © 2024 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.

I thank Sam Milazzo and David Maxine for permission to use their photos. Thanks also to Oz Con International and the Richburg-Wirt Historical Society.

Photograph of Eric Shanower at Oz Con International copyright © 2024 Sam Milazzo. All rights reserved.

Photograph of Eric Shanower at Richburg-Wirt Historical Society copyright © 2024 David Maxine. All rights reserved.