Perkins Opera House: Monticello's Grand Stage
Florida
The little city of Monticello, Florida has kept its opera house alive for more than a hundred and thirty years, and it remains one of the most intact Victorian-era performance spaces in the Deep South.
In the late eighteen eighties, new railroads were threading through Jefferson County, and local businessmen saw an opportunity. The town needed cultural attractions to lure passengers off the trains. John H. Perkins, one of Monticello's most prosperous merchants, struck a deal: he would fund a grand commercial and entertainment building and receive a ten-year tax break in return. He hired architect W. R. Gunn from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in eighteen ninety the Perkins Block was complete.
The ground floor housed three storefronts running Perkins' mercantile empire: a general store and sewing machine shop, a hardware outlet, and a farm implement supply. Climb to the second floor and the tone changed entirely. A large lobby opened into a full theatrical hall with what contemporaries called the largest stage in the region and acoustics that are remarkable to this day. Touring companies, local dramatic societies, political rallies, and traveling lecturers all filled the house in the decades that followed.
Monticello itself sat at the center of a prosperous agricultural county, its courthouse square lined with Greek Revival homes built by planters in the eighteen forties and fifties. The opera house was the cultural crown of a community that took its name from Thomas Jefferson's Virginia estate. Jefferson County was in fact named for the president himself, and the town has maintained that connection to Federal-era elegance ever since.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two and today operates as a working performing arts venue. The wooden stage floor that absorbed the footfalls of a century of performers still carries a show, making the Monticello Opera House one of the few surviving buildings of its kind that never stopped being what it was built to be.
