ten children, three of whom went into business with their father. When I was a kid, Christopher’s great-grandson Nat was still running Hager’s Department Store.
Christopher Hager grew up in a subsistence culture and helped create an urban one. The Lancaster of his youth—capital of Pennsylvania from 1789 to 1812, and briefly a candidate for the nation’s capital—was a mostly agrarian community whose six thousand inhabitants, half of them German, half English, lived in one- and two-story brick homes on unpaved streets shaded by trees and watered by tributaries of the Conestoga River. In its size and scope, the place was almost medieval. The chief industry in the surrounding county was flour milling. Lancaster itself had a market and courthouse, a dozen or so churches, and at least as many taverns, where itinerant players sometimes put on shows. (In the year of Hager’s birth, a Pennsylvania actor named John Durang performed an “Indian War and Scalp Dance” for the state governor at the Sign of the White Horse, on King Street, a stone’s throw from the workhouse where the Conestogas perished.)
By the time Hager reached middle age, the town of Lancaster had become a city with a population of more than twelve thousand and what one resident remembered as “nothing but bustle and confusion, arrivals and departures of cars, stages, carriages, hacks, drays, and wheelbarrows, with hundreds of people, and thousands of tons of merchandise.” Paved streets, lit by gas, were home to multistory banks, stores, churches, a telegraph office, and the city’s first lager brewery. Rail lines and a new canal, plied by a steamboat called the Conestoga, linked the inland city to Philadelphia and Baltimore. There was talk of building a bigger courthouse and a new jail. The old colonial prison on Prince Street had run out of space, and besides, the citizens of Lancaster were tired of having inmates in their midst—criminals petty and grave, debtors, drunks, Negroes fleeing slavery. Children on their way to school used to see prisoners gazing forlornly from the building’s grated windows, and everyone agreed that was too much. So work began on a new and much larger jail on the city’s east end.
The new facility, a massive sandstone fortress that looked like a castle, opened in the fall of 1851, and the following spring, officials put Lancaster’s now-vacant “old Bastile” up for sale. Christopher Hager submitted the highest bid—$8,400, roughly $250,000 in 2013 currency. Within a month of purchasing the prison complex, he announced his intention to erect a four-story public hall in its stead, to be used for meetings, conventions, lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and plays—a secular place of congregation for the residents of the city whose prosperity was so vital to his and his family’s interests. He also disclosed the name of the building he intended to construct on the site of the old prison and workhouse: Fulton Hall, in honor of the late Robert Fulton, the Lancaster County–born engineer and inventor whose inventions were fueling Hager’s century.
In early American villages, the meetinghouse “determined the character and limits of the community,” Lewis Mumford writes in his early twentieth-century survey of American architecture, Sticks and Stones. “Around the meeting-house the rest of the community crystallized in a definite pattern, tight and homogeneous.” As the American village morphed into a city, its need to retain a sense of community grew. Town halls—the nineteenth-century equivalent of the colonial meetinghouse—were crucial to that effort.
Although he left no public explanation of his reasons for wanting to build Fulton Hall, the canny Christopher Hager seems to have grasped instinctively what Mumford, citing Plato’s Republic, teaches in his book: that “an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing.” Hager saw that his expanding city required a new gathering place where members of the community could forge bonds that were neither religious nor legal but rather social, cultural, and political, and that, furthermore, such a building could, in its very appearance and configuration, be an instructive and edifying force.
Enter Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia. Thirty-seven, brash and opportunistic, a quick learner who had begun his career as a carpenter and risen to architect, the man Hager chose to design Fulton Hall possessed no formal training but had what both men believed the profession required: taste, sensitivity, discrimination, and a vast fund of practical knowledge of the sort that defined so much of nineteenth-century American enterprise. Sloan understood masonry, joinery, carpentry, plastering, and painting; he knew why Grecian moldings were superior and that if you were to avoid lawsuits, you had to sign an airtight contract.
His models, like those of so many of his peers, were European—Palladio, Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren. When it came to style, Sloan preferred the Italianate. “Its great pliability of design, its facile adaptation to our wants and habits, together with its finished, elegant, and picturesque appearance, give it precedence over every other,” he explained in one of the numerous books and articles he published in an effort to educate American consumers. “It speaks of the inhabitant as a man of wealth, who wishes in a quiet way to enjoy his wealth. It speaks of him as a person of educated and refined tastes, who can appreciate the beautiful both in art and nature.”
I can imagine Hager’s delight at seeing himself in just this light, a man of means and polish, a first-generation American who had reached the heights of civic leadership and could now extend his good taste to the community. It’s little wonder he and Sloan hit it off. (A year later, Hager would help hire Sloan to design an ornate new pulpit at Trinity Lutheran.) To the architect, Hager was an ideal client: a man of independent thought and strong opinion, one of those thrusting, inquisitive personalities who were reshaping the cultural life of the United States.
The two would first have talked about what Hager wanted: a multipurpose building flexible enough to accommodate the communal needs of a flourishing populace, a place of elegance, European in feel and look. Sloan would have drawn up floor plans, then elevations measured to scale, and finally a sketch showing the hall as it would look “in nature” from a given perspective. That drawing, now on display in the office of the Fulton’s managing director, reveals a square edifice whose milky façade rises in ever more delicate layers toward an airy cupola. Hager must have exulted when he first held the sketch in his hands. The front of Sloan’s hall is symmetrical but not monotonous, a pleasing blend of angles and arches, reason and sentiment. The heavy stone blocks of its first two floors give way to smooth plaster and a pitched roof with deep eaves held up by the Grecian cornices Sloan loved. The architect was designing for posterity: “We Americans are not ashamed that we have nothing now venerable in years,” he wrote in 1852, the year he designed Fulton Hall, “but we may fear that our descendants will have cause so to be, and have few buildings to point out, saying, this is the work of our fathers.”
Sloan and Hager agreed that the stage inside the hall would face east, as altars traditionally do, and that the side and back walls of the building would be constructed of economic brick. They also agreed to retain as much of the old prison complex as necessary to support the new structure. The architect knew stone to be the best foundation for any building, and the jail walls had already withstood nearly a century of wind, heat, rain, and ice without cracking, so he left whole stretches of James Webb’s masonry intact, including a two-story extension, with a vaulted double door, at the rear of the building on Water Street.
At the opposite end of the site, toward Prince Street, Sloan installed heavy log piers to help buttress his hall. The property itself was wildly uneven. Architect Dick Levengood, who took part in a late twentieth-century renovation of the Fulton Theatre, speaks of the “large-grade differential from the front of the building to the rear”—the site drops as much as fifteen feet from Prince Street to Water—and says the lot is “very challenging. It turns all the way around the corner, it drops both ways.” Webb had already figured out how to build on the site “so you don’t mess with it.”
Hager took out a permit to construct Fulton Hall in early May 1852, and work began at once. He told reporters the new building would be ready in four months. It was hot, and at least one worker was felled by sunstroke. Teenage boys hung around
