The Springer Opera House

On February twenty-first, eighteen seventy-one, a man named Francis Joseph Springer opened a theater in downtown Columbus and invited the world to come perform in it. Springer had come to Georgia from Alsace, the region on the French-German border that had passed back and forth between the two countries for centuries, and he had ambitions for his adopted city that were larger than the city quite expected.

The Springer Opera House, which still stands at One Hundred Three Tenth Street, became one of the most celebrated venues between New York and New Orleans within a decade of its opening. Edwin Booth, the greatest Shakespearean actor of the American nineteenth century, played Hamlet here in eighteen seventy-six. Oscar Wilde came to lecture. William Jennings Bryan came to orate. John L. Sullivan came to demonstrate boxing. The theater drew the full range of what American culture was producing in the Gilded Age, channeled through a city of modest size on the Georgia fall line.

It closed during the Depression, reopened as a movie house, then closed again in nineteen fifty-eight. A local preservation campaign in nineteen sixty-four prevented its demolition. Restored through the nineteen sixties, the Springer was first named Georgia's official state theater in nineteen seventy-one, a designation made permanent in nineteen ninety-two; it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy and named a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-eight.

Ma Rainey performed her first public show here as a fourteen-year-old in nineteen hundred. The stage that launched one of the great American musical careers is still in use, still producing plays, still occupying the same Victorian brick shell that Francis Springer built when Columbus was thirty years old and trying to convince itself it was a metropolis.