Building
Fulton Hall, named after Robert Fulton, Lancaster County's steam engine pioneer, was built on the foundation of Lancaster's pre-Revolutionary jail. In 1763, a vigilante gang known as the Paxtang Boys massacred the Conestoga Indians being held there for their protection. This was a monumental event throughout the colonies and became the subject matter for the first plays ever written on American soil - A Dialogue Between Andrew Trueman and Thomas Zealot About the Killing the Indians at Cannestogoe and Lancaster and The Paxton Boys, a Farce. The exterior wall of the jail courtyard is now the back wall of the theatre. Christopher Hager, a Lancaster merchant and civic leader, commissioned the renowned Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan (who later designed the Lancaster County Courthouse) to create a building that would serve as a community center for meetings, lectures, concerts, and theatrical performances. The building was erected in 1852.
The Fulton Theatre was later modified by noted theatrical architect Edwin Forrest Durang, is one of only three theatres recognized as National Historic Landmarks (the others are the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and the Goldenrod Showboat in St. Louis, Missouri). The 1959 production of Our Town, starring Jeanne Clemson, marked that first time that a live theater production had been performed at the Fulton Opera House in thirty years.
Read more about this topic: Fulton Opera House
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“I am not building here a statue to erect at the town crossroads, or in a church or a public square.... This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The artist must be an egotist because, like the spider, he draws all his building material from his own breast. But just the same the artist alone among men knows what true humility means. His reach forever exceeds his grasp. He can never be satisfied with his work. He knows when he has done well, but he knows he has never attained his dream. He knows he never can.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)