Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

June 18, 2012

Maine opera house celebrates 100 years

The Stonington Opera House has seen good times and bad — and good again — in its 100-year existence. This year, a major celebration.

By Bob Keyes bkeyes@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

"All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked the other way,

And saw three islands in a bay." 

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote those words 100 years ago, in a poem she titled "Renascence." She was just a kid, barely 20 years old and living in Camden. Her poem garnered attention and praise, and set her on a literary path that led eventually to the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The Maine writer was the first woman to win the prestigious literary award.

Millay, whose work will be interpreted this summer in a centennial celebration at Stonington Opera House, looked out toward a distant horizon and imagined a bigger life for herself.

Looking back through the prism of a 100-year-old lens, it's easy to see now that the young writer did not harbor her dreams in private isolation. In Maine and across America, 1912 was a bellwether year for vision, ambition and hope.

Leon Leonwood Bean started selling hunting boots in Freeport. Fenway Park opened in Boston. In Chicago, Nabisco introduced the Oreo cookie. All the way out West, Paramount Pictures began making movies in Hollywood.

And in a booming island community, the Stonington Opera House opened its doors.

"What a time in the life of America," said Linda Nelson, executive director of Opera House Arts, which programs year-long entertainment in the historic opera house. "You can see the dreams of America in places like the opera house and Fenway Park. People had these dreams, and people were pursuing them. It was a time of tremendous optimism in this country."

That same year in Belfast -- on the very day the Titanic set sail from England -- a movie theater opened in a downtown storefront. The Colonial Theatre still operates today, and is celebrating its centennial this year.

"It's kind of amazing when you look back," said Colonial co-owner Mike Hurley. "It just seems like what a cooking time it was in America. A lot of things began in 1912, and some really important things too. And a lot of them have stayed important for 100 years."

With an attitude expressed so eloquently by Millay, our ancestors of a century ago embraced a world that was far bigger and expansive than they could imagine.

Then again, the world was within reach.

In places like Stonington, the beaches of Europe and rice paddies of Asia felt as close as they do today. Stonington in 1912 was a cosmopolitan, bustling place, with 5,000 residents -- nearly 4,000 more than today -- 42 downtown businesses and an international economy centered around granite, which was cut in local quarries and shipped all over the world. Fishing was part of the equation, but not nearly to the degree that it is today.

Sailors and sea captains filled their homes with art and artifacts from foreign lands, collected during their excursions across many seas.

FIRST BUILT IN 1886

The opera house was the center of activity, a populist icon in a cultural hotbed. It looked out across the bay and across the ocean. Its resplendent green tower rose four stories from the shallow end of a steep hill.

It wasn't a lighthouse, but it served as a symbolic beacon for returning ships and an anchor for the community's consciousness.

"Stonington was a boomtown," Nelson said, "and the opera house was part of the boom."

The current opera house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is actually the third on the site. The first, an amusement hall, was built in 1886. It was enlarged at the turn of the 20th century to accommodate as many as 1,000 people. But it burned in 1910.

(Continued on page 2)

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