King Opera House: Van Buren's Victorian Stage
Near Fort Smith, Arkansas
The building that became the King Opera House in Van Buren, Arkansas, started life in eighteen eighty as the Wallace Block, housing a billiard parlor on one side and a saloon on the other, with the town newspaper on the second floor. Colonel Henry P. King purchased it in eighteen ninety-eight and transformed it.
On October eighteenth, nineteen oh one, the King Opera House opened with a production of Faust. For more than a decade it was the cultural center of this Arkansas River town, staging traveling shows and performances for a region that had few other entertainment options. A fire in March of nineteen fourteen damaged the interior, though vaudeville bookings continued, and after a remodel the building reopened in nineteen nineteen as a movie house. The King Opera House is now a contributing property to the Van Buren Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the better-preserved examples of Victorian commercial architecture in western Arkansas.
