to death. (The rumor could well have been true: in a late eighteenth-century petition to the Lancaster court, prisoners inside the jail complained that they were fed “but one single pound of bread” a day, “which is scearsly suffitient to keep us alive.”)
Hager himself kept a close eye on the building and made frequent trips to Philadelphia to consult with Sloan. There were endless details to select: paint colors, window fastenings, plaster molds, ventilation, plumbing, light fixtures, doors. The press kept avid track of the project. “The new city hall, in Prince Street, is progressing finely,” the Lancaster Saturday Express noted in July. “Mr. Hager is pushing the work as rapidly as possible towards an early completion. It will be one of the finest public halls in the state.” Hager later calculated he spent $22,000—some $650,000 in 2013 dollars—on the venture.
Across America, people were doing just as he was, building shrines of culture festooned with muses and lyres in towns that a few years earlier had been little more than frontier outposts. The country was refining itself, as Sloan hoped it would. Part of that process was a newfound tolerance for the dramatic arts. William Penn and his Quaker peers had frowned on theater, and the first Continental Congress had banned it outright, but by 1850, major cities east of the Mississippi all had stages, and the suddenly popular art had spread to California, where men were digging for gold. Stock companies prospered. An American style of performance was emerging, raucous and physical. This had something to do with the freewheeling nature of the country itself, it seemed, with evangelical preachers who danced and barked and erupted in convulsions, with politicians who courted voters through bombast, and audiences addicted to sensation.
The whole enterprise had once smacked of the tawdry and louche, and itinerant companies—mostly English—hovered on the margins of respectable society. The city of Lancaster had shunned playacting until the Revolution, when a local brewer turned his beerhouse into a short-lived theater so that British soldiers held captive in the town could put on Shakespeare. It’s likely young Robert Fulton, who was fond of sketching the enemy in his midst, attended. But after the war, the chary town resumed its old ways. “There is no theater, no assemblies, no literary society, nor any other public entertainment, except an itinerant exhibition of wax works or a puppet show,” a visitor in 1810 grumbled. Taverns sometimes brought in theatricals and panoramas, and there were sporadic attempts in the 1830s and ’40s to open a genuine theater, but nothing stuck.
Not so in 1852. In addition to its nine banks, sixteen places of worship, fifty-seven common schools, and nine newspapers, Lancaster would soon enjoy a public hall. As the walls of Sloan’s brick-and-stone concoction rose, excitement grew. “The first floor room is intended for political meetings, county conventions, etc.,” the Examiner and Herald reported. “The second is to be fitted more elaborately and to be used for lectures and entertainments of a social nature. The third is to be occupied by societies.” By fall, the paper added brightly, “we may have the pleasure of hearing Jenny Lind in Fulton Hall.”
In September Hager opened the unfinished building briefly so that the local Odd Fellows, who had been struggling to build their own lodge, could hold a soirée. Covering the event, the pro-temperance Saturday Express issued the welcome news that Fulton Hall did not allow liquor on its premises. By early October, workers were putting the final touches on the new structure. That month, Lancaster’s city council repealed an 1846 ordinance requiring a tax on “plays, shows, theatrical entertainments and circus performances.” The pennywise Hager was surely pleased.
And then it was complete, Sloan’s buttery palace, brilliant in the autumn sun, ready for business. The young city had seen nothing like it. Squint, and you’d think you were standing before a cathedral. In place of a steeple there was a lightning rod, and the tympanum above the front entrance showed not heaven and hell but a glass orb wreathed in flowers, but still, Sloan had wrought a thing of beauty, a paean to European taste and American ambition.
It rained on opening night, and Lancaster’s streets turned to mud. Crowds came nonetheless, ladies in crinolines and shawls, men in tailcoats and gloves. Hager, his hair thinning, sideburns going gray, was there to greet them. He had distributed fifteen hundred free tickets, and nearly that number of people showed up. One by one, they ascended Sloan’s handsome staircase to the second-floor saloon (from the French salon), lit by three gas chandeliers and thirty-two wall jets, and took their seats on wooden benches facing a small platform at the far end of the room.
The main speaker of the evening, Judge Alexander Hayes, who had recently succeeded Hager as president of the Conestoga Cotton Mills, praised his colleague’s achievement and reminded listeners that cities across Europe had long ago recognized the need for theaters, gardens, promenades, orchestras, and galleries. Now, Hayes exclaimed, it was Lancaster’s turn, the desire for recreation following “long continued effort, as naturally as night follows day.” The local Philharmonic Society struck up a polka written expressly for the occasion and dedicated to Christopher Hager, and the crowd, roused by the brisk tune, burst into applause.
As I summon this enchanted evening I see a room bathed in yellow light and a mass of glowing faces. All of Lancaster has turned out, it appears—shopkeepers and haberdashers, ironmasters, gun makers, bankers, lawyers, teachers, women in curls and chignons, young men with tidy beards. Christopher Hager stands in their midst, eyes creased in merriment as he accepts the congratulations of his neighbors and friends. Off in a corner the stentorian Judge Hayes is holding forth about the genius loci of this hall, how it will “kindle the social affections, adding length as well as happiness to life.” That this was recently the site of the local jail and workhouse—and witness to a massacre whose notoriety persists—is momentarily forgotten.
Now the strains of Hager’s polka give way to the oom-pah-pah of a brass band, and I catch sight of a middle-aged woman swaying in time to the music. Fair-skinned and gray-eyed, she might be me. One foot taps gently against the floor. She wears a taffeta gown with a lace collar and long sleeves, and beneath it a corset and petticoats stiffened with whalebone, although she is not thinking now of the ocean life that gave rise to her fashionable silhouette. She seems oblivious to anything but her own enjoyment this night. Later she will scrawl a note in her diary—a great and attractive crowd filled Mr. Hager’s new hall, we stayed past 9:30—and in time she will buy a small volume in which to record her impressions of the plays she sees here.
Her boots are damp from the rain outside. When the band pauses, she can hear the thrum of water against the windowpanes. The sound pulls her briefly out of her reverie, and she thinks back to this afternoon, to the small leather case she received from the Daguerrian Gallery on Queen Street. The studio opened in May, but it was not until last week that she ventured to sit for her picture, curiosity finally conquering fear. The camera operator had put her head in a vise, and she’d sat for three minutes, unsmiling, while the exposure took. Opening the case this afternoon, she discovered a silvery image inside a gilt frame, and for the first time beheld her own likeness. I saw my face as I had never seen it before, she wrote in her diary, and strange thoughts flowed through my mind.
The proprietors of the gallery had promised her a “lifelike and enduring” portrait, but in fact she looked like a ghost. If she tilted the image in one direction or another, she found, her face vanished, and the effect was unsettling. In my estimation it is better to make the hearts of your friends the plates upon which to impress our pictures, than steel, brass or any inanimates, she wrote, and then closed the little case, vowing not to dwell further on the matter. But she couldn’t help herself. Dipping her pen back into the ink, she scribbled, My first picture! When will my last one be taken? Let the future answer.
Now, inside Mr. Hager’s hall, the band has resumed playing, and the bright present again quells the afternoon’s odd sensations. The woman in the taffeta gown turns with pleasure to the spectacle around her. The room is vast and smells of fresh paint; there is a tiny balcony at one end, and there are tall windows along each wall. Mr. Hager has pledged that this will be the site of so much she has dreamed
