children, soon to be seven, and they belonged to a large German community whose members attended German-language churches and sang in German choirs and drank lager at picnics in the woods on the edge of town. Yecker had fled hunger and revolution in Europe and survived a war in his adopted land, and he was an optimist. The saddlery business had prospered during the war—the demand for trunks and bridles and knapsacks ever mounting—and he now had the means to buy property. Accordingly, on November 23, 1865, he and a business partner, Hilaire Zaepfel, a former saddler turned hotelkeeper, paid $16,200 for a “three-story brick tenement” with a creamy white façade near the corner of Prince and King Streets, in downtown Lancaster. The building, Fulton Hall, was thirteen years old, although its stone foundations went back more than a century.
Behind its pale veneer, Fulton Hall was little more than an assortment of meeting rooms and a large auditorium with rows of wooden benches and a small platform at one end. Since 1852, this building had served the citizens of Lancaster as a courthouse, stage, chapel, armory, auditorium, boot camp, warehouse, meeting place, concert hall, lecture room, exhibition space, ballroom, campaign rally ground, and occasional funeral parlor. Yecker wanted to turn it into a theater, a place to see and be seen. He envisioned a wide stage and a drop curtain with scenes of Europe, tiered seats, a domed ceiling, low footlights. It’s doubtful he knew anything about Thespis or the Teatro Olimpico or London’s Globe, about the myriad ways theater had entered people’s imaginations through history and shaped civilizations and occasionally threatened governments. He simply saw a chance to make money and perhaps his mark.
Competition was scarce. One block up the street, a stereoscope belonging to the Messrs. Hambright offered fifty different views of battlefields and landscapes. There were occasional concerts by German men’s choirs and traveling singers. The Fulton had its own bookings. Two days after Yecker bought the place, a local fire company held a fair inside the hall, with flags and prizes and music by a cornet band. From an arch suspended over the stage, gas jets spelled out the company’s motto: “When Duty Calls ’Tis Ours to Obey.” Below it stood a pedestal with a statue of the goddess of Liberty cradling an American flag in the hollow of one arm. In her other arm she held a scroll inscribed with the names Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, Reynolds, and Hooker.
Within the month, the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng would play Fulton Hall on their farewell tour, together with a pair of “wild” Australian children who had reportedly been captured by gold hunters and who, according to the ads, had “long, sharp teeth” and curiously small heads.
On New Year’s Day 1866, two months after Yecker’s purchase, Fulton Hall presented a series of sixty-three tableaux based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spectacle had enjoyed a long run in London, including a performance at Buckingham Palace before Queen Victoria, and was said to be an ideal vehicle for teaching children “the solemn and sublime truths of man’s disobedience and fall, and God’s omnipotence.” Perhaps young Americans needed such instruction, although it’s likely the recent war had taught them plenty about man’s disobedience.
Still, it was a new era. For the first time in four years, Americans could wake on the first of January free from the cloud of battle. There were problems, of course: what to do with the nation’s newly emancipated black population, how to reunite North and South. Lancaster’s representative to Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican who had often used the stage of Fulton Hall to trumpet abolition, wanted to remake the South entirely, to take land from plantation owners and distribute it to former slaves and to give every African American the right to vote. He decried the bigotry that had oppressed black men and women for two centuries and was now depriving them “of every right in the Southern states. We have joined in inflicting these wrongs,” he said.
But Stevens hadn’t long to live, and his vision of a beneficent South would die with him. Meanwhile, people north of the Mason-Dixon Line were interested in a new kind of America. The nation was pushing west. Photographs and prints brought radiant mountain vistas home to citizens in the eastern United States, and dime novels and frontier dramas captured the exploits of scouts and buffalo hunters. The Union Pacific had already reached Nebraska. In another year, General William Tecumseh Sherman would be sent west to help clear the way for trains, much as he’d cleared Georgia for federal troops. “Eastern people must not allow their sympathy with the Indians to make them forget what is due to those who are pushing the ‘frontier’ farther and farther west,” Sherman declared. In three years, rail lines would span the continent.
If some Americans believed in progress more than God, it was understandable. There were new deities to exalt: the self-made man, entrepreneurs like Yecker, exemplars of a budding plutocracy. If some Americans found greater solace in entertainment than prayer, that too was understandable. God’s hand “is amputated now / And God cannot be found,” Emily Dickinson would write. People worshipped capital and technology, sought redemption not just at church but in nature and on the stage. Why not put your faith in the giant redwoods of northern California or in a $60,000 theatrical extravaganza whose sixty-three scenes included depictions of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, Adam’s fall, and a massive spectacle in which heaven’s hosts put down a rebellion by Satan’s followers?
Hundreds of Lancastrians turned out to see the Miltonian Tableaux at Fulton Hall on the first of January 1866. Hundreds more were turned away. Inside the auditorium, which could hold a thousand, it was standing room only. The show’s popularity, wrote the Lancaster Evening Examiner, “proves the good taste and moral worth of the community in which we live.” But Blasius Yecker had a hunch his tasteful community wanted even more.
He had avoided military service himself. When Abraham Lincoln imposed a draft in 1863—the first in the country’s history—Yecker and twenty other Lancaster men had each put $50 into a common fund with the understanding that should any of them be called up, $300 would be withdrawn to buy the draftee’s way out of the army. Thus did the burden of preserving the nation pass from its older immigrants to its newest and poorest, notably the Irish, who were often dragooned into service the moment they stepped off the boat. Yecker (whose name never did appear on the long lists of the conscripted) stayed home and watched his fortunes and family grow.
He was a savvy businessman. He would eventually buy out his partner’s share of the Fulton and take over management of the theater himself, but for now, in the first months of 1866, he focused on turning their musty hall into a posh attraction. Inside the Fulton’s main auditorium, the sight lines were bad, and you couldn’t reach the stage except by walking from the back of the room to the front. Ventilation was poor, and, thanks partly to a shooting gallery upstairs and a basement full of beer and tobacco, the hall stank.
Shortly after the Miltonian Tableaux closed, Yecker hired a crew of workmen to overhaul the Fulton. They cut a new door into the rear of the building, replaced its two dingy dressing rooms with four clean compartments, tore out the dilapidated sets and rolling stage machinery, and installed modern fixtures, including footlights low enough to see over. They introduced a new ventilation system, widened the makeshift stage to fifteen feet, and exchanged the uncomfortable wooden benches in the auditorium for orchestra chairs that rose in tiers toward the lobby, so that people at the back of the room no longer had to stand or “roost” on the backs of the seats in front of them in order to see what was happening onstage.
A pair of artists from Philadelphia created twenty new pieces of scenery for the stage—ten flats and ten wings—showing landscapes, cities, parlors, and streets. But the pièce de résistance was the Fulton’s new drop curtain, for which Yecker reportedly paid $200. It featured a panorama of Venice: the Rialto and Grand Canal, Saint Mark’s Basilica, sundry palaces, gondolas and barges. Beneath it Yecker hung a quote from Byron: “Those days are gone—but Beauty still is here.” The poet was referring to Venice, but Lancastrians would have understood it to mean them. Here in this small town sixty-five miles west of Philadelphia, once the nation’s largest inland city, inside this newly refurbished hall—this theater—here too was beauty and myth, a longing for the past and a conviction that
