The Stage Between Detroit and Chicago

Route Twelve has been a road between Detroit and Chicago for a very long time, and in the late eighteen hundreds every town along it competed for the attention of traveling performers moving between those two cities. Coldwater, Michigan won more than its share of that competition because of a building that a prosperous local merchant named Barton S. Tibbits decided to bankroll in eighteen eighty-two.

The Tibbits Opera House opened on September twenty-first, eighteen eighty-two, with a performance of Maid of Arran. Its architect was Mortimer L. Smith of Detroit, who designed it in the French Second Empire style with a facade of intricately detailed sheet-metal cornices, columns, brackets, and window arches. Gold-leafed letters spelled out the building's name across the front. Bronze light fixtures flanked the entrance. For a town of several thousand people on the Michigan prairie, it was a building that announced ambition.

And it delivered on that ambition. Through the late eighteen hundreds and into the nineteen-teens, Tibbits was one of the premier stops on the touring circuit between the two great Midwestern cities. Ethel Barrymore appeared on its stage. So did Joseph Jefferson, who made a career playing Rip Van Winkle in theaters across America, and Eddie Foy, one of the best-known comedians of the vaudeville era. Maude Adams, the most celebrated actress of her generation and the original Peter Pan on Broadway, performed here as well.

By nineteen twenty the era of the grand traveling circuit was fading, and the opera house adapted. It became a movie house, then went through periods of decline and revival. The building survived where many of its contemporaries did not, and today it is considered the second-oldest surviving theater in Michigan.

In two thousand nineteen the Tibbits Opera House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It still operates as a performing arts center, presenting community theater, professional productions, and children's programs. The sheet-metal facade, restored in the two thousand-tens, looks very much as Mortimer Smith designed it a hundred and forty years ago.