California's First Theater
Near Monterey, California
On the corner of Pacific and Scott Streets stands a weathered adobe that calls itself the First Theater in California. It was built in the eighteen forties by a sailor named Jack Swan as a lodging house and tavern for his fellow seamen. Then, with American soldiers occupying Monterey after the war with Mexico, the little building found a new purpose.
Bored young volunteers of Colonel Jonathan Stevenson's New York regiment turned Swan's saloon into a playhouse, hanging blankets for curtains and charging admission in the scarce coin of the day. In eighteen forty seven and eighteen forty eight they staged the first paid public theatrical performances the territory had ever seen, including a patriotic melodrama called Putnam, the Iron Son of Seventy Six. Early in the twentieth century preservationists, the California Historic Landmarks League, bought the building and gave it to the state of California.
It survives today as part of Monterey State Historic Park, a humble adobe that gave California its first taste of the stage. The Custom House nearby, built around eighteen twenty-one by the Mexican government, is California's oldest public building, and the first American flag was raised there on the seventh of July, eighteen forty-six. Monterey State Historic Park was established in nineteen sixteen, and the old town around it was declared a National Historic Landmark district in nineteen seventy.
