Sumter Town Hall-Opera House

About this property

Sumter Town Hall-Opera House, also known as the Sumter Academy of Music, is a historic town hall building located at Sumter, Sumter County, South Carolina. It was built in 1893, and is a four-story, ashlar brick Richardsonian Romanesque style building. It features a four-faced clock tower that serves as a focal point for the entire area. The building was remodeled internally in 1936, converting the first floor into a movie theater and the second floor opera house into offices. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. It is located in the Sumter Historic District. The historic Opera House stands tall and proud in the heart of downtown Sumter, South Carolina and is known as one of Sumter’s Crown Jewels. Through the years this great building has served a number of purposes and has seen a great deal of change. In 1987 with the reopening of this building, its past is remembered as its future is celebrated. 1872: On January 14, 1872, the cornerstone was laid on Main Street in Sumter for a town hall and marketplace. $2,307.45 had been raised when contractors R.J. Tuomey, mason, and Hiram Phillips, carpenter, were hired to construct the building. By June the exterior was completed and painted, but the interior was still incomplete. Unfortunately, all the money for this project had been spent, and it was necessary for the promoters to obtain credit to hire A.J. Moses to complete the job. Completed in December, it was a two-story wooden structure with two rooms on the ground floor a guardhouse and market in the rear, and an elegant theater upstairs. The theater had 500 seats that could be removed for dances and receptions. 1873: Originally the town hall was called the Opera House, but in 1873, it was renamed the Music Hall. 1886: Opera prima donnas Clara Louise Kellogg, born in Sumter in 1839, was the first nationally acclaimed performer to appear in an opera in the upstairs Music Hall, which was managed by D. J. Auld. 1888: Belva Ann Lockwood, who was known as the "Queen of the Bar" for being the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, gave a lecture for the citizens of Sumter. Ms. Lockwood was also the first woman candidate for presidency of the United States, nominated in 1884 and 1888 by the National Equal Rights Party. An unusually small crowd expressed Sumter*s disapproval of the speaker. 1889: Sumter City Council signed a three- year lease on the hall with J.A. Schwerin & Company at a rental rate of $300.00 a year. The name of the hall was changed to the Academy of Music. 1890: Renovations included the addition of fifty electric lights, an inclined floor, and seven tiers of noiseless opera chairs with hat racks. The remodeled stage featured a box on each side and a drop curtain, painted by Eugene Cramer of Columbia, South Carolina, which showed a view of Lake Como nestled among the hills of Italy. The total number of seats was increased to 700.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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