antebellum hit Uncle Tom’s Cabin, well on its way to becoming the single most produced play in the history of the American theater. Slavery may have ended elsewhere in America, but it flourished onstage, and Yecker hoped to profit from it.
The novelty of his new theater soon faded, though, and by the end of Harrison’s inaugural season, in April 1866, ticket sales had plunged. One of Harrison’s actors returned for a six-day run in May, but audiences were so sparse he closed three days early. As it happened, Yecker’s fifth child was born the next day. He couldn’t afford to keep his theater dark, not even in the sticky heat of a mid-Atlantic summer, and so he improvised. In June he brought in a pair of pianists; in July, a minstrel show; in August, another acting company. For the next year Yecker kept up the pattern: theater troupes alternated with comedians, singers with magicians, lecturers, trained dogs, acrobats, and dioramas, among them the Great Lincoln Memorial Tableaux, a series of sixty “lifelike and thrilling” panoramas devoted to the late president’s memory and the pursuit, capture, trial, and execution of his killer. But audiences continued to dwindle, and the Fulton increasingly fell to local use: church fairs, commencement ceremonies, fundraisers for a monument to honor the city’s fallen soldiers and sailors.
Yecker was thirty-two and handsome, with brooding, almost melancholy eyes and dark hair, which he combed back from his face in immaculate waves. In the few photographs of him that survive, he is a model of bourgeois respectability in a tailored suit, crisp white shirt and bow tie, glistening black shoes. It’s hard to know what drove this immigrant saddler to create a theater in the middle of his adopted city. Civic pride? A thirst for adventure? The conviction that he could make money as a showman? If so, he was reckoning against the odds. A fellow nineteenth-century theater manager said he could recall “scarcely a single instance . . . of a persevering manager dying in comfortable circumstances.”
In his 1855 Autobiography, Phineas Taylor Barnum had set forth ten rules for entrepreneurial success, among them “select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations.” Yecker, like Barnum, chose entertainment, the presentation of “varieties.” “Work at it if necessary early and late,” Barnum advised, “in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.” P. T. Barnum had made a fortune in show business, largely by peddling humbug—a black woman whom he advertised as the 161-year-old former nanny of George Washington, the desiccated remains of a supposed mermaid, an African American man who dressed in a suit of black hair, grunted on cue, and shambled across the stage like a monkey. Barnum labeled him “What Is It?”
Yecker had little interest in hawking tricks, but he shared Barnum’s eye for spectacle and grasp of middlebrow taste, and both men understood the need for propriety, personal as well as professional. Yecker attended Mass on Sundays and during his first years at Fulton Hall continued to operate his harness shop, turning out bridles and martingales for his neighbors even as he tried to lure them into his theater with the promise of escape.
Fulton Hall did not tower as high as Saint Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, where Yecker worshipped. It had no steeple whose chimes pealed repeatedly through the day, as did Trinity Lutheran Church a few blocks up the street. It lacked the stained-glass windows and stately pews of the city’s Episcopal and Presbyterian sanctuaries, but Yecker’s hall did have an unmistakable grandeur. The beveled stones at the base of its façade evoked the mansions of Florence, its arched windows the lagoons of Venice, its Gothic lines the cathedrals of northern Europe. Everything conspired to lift your eyes up to the top of the building, where a gabled roof erupted in tiny crenellations pointing heavenward. “Whenever men have become skillful architects at all, there has been a tendency in them to build high,” John Ruskin had written a decade before Yecker bought his hall, “not in any religious feeling, but in mere exuberance of spirit and power—as they dance or sing—with a certain mingling of vanity—like the feeling in which a child builds a tower of cards.”
A white building in a red-brick city, a pleasure palace in a workaday world—Fulton Hall was indeed exuberant. Cross our threshold, its doors seemed to proclaim, and you will find harmony and goodwill, laughter, the strangeness of other worlds. Above all you will encounter actors, men and women possessed of a curious energy, whose resonant voices and powerful bodies recount the myths on which our lives rely. “Those days are gone,” the curtain inside Yecker’s spacious auditorium read, “but Beauty still is here.” Beauty, yes, and hope, an image of the epic future.
Here too was the ghosted past. If you were to tunnel down through Yecker’s hall, from its pitched roof through its wood floors and timber joists to the stone foundations of the building and beyond, into the earth, you would find arrowheads and clay pipes, the precolonial beginnings of the country, and if you were to dig further, into the soft, erosion-prone bedrock of this place, you would touch the skeletons of fish swimming in stone. Long before Blasius Yecker bought Fulton Hall, before the magistrates of colonial Lancaster picked this site for their jail, before Charles II granted this land—with all its “fields, woods, underwoods, mountains, hills, fenns, isles, lakes, rivers, waters, rivulets, bays and inlets”—to William Penn, long before Susquehannocks walked here in search of berries and deer, water covered the surface of this particular earth, and pale creatures glided along its currents in the dark. It was even then a place of enchantment, a penumbral world where anything could happen, and from its depths would come a continent whose immense, unstoried wilderness took your breath away.
THE KILLING OF THE CONESTOGAS: 1763
Black braids frame her face. She wears a colorful headband with an even more colorful feather, a brown dress, a choker strung with plump red beads. I was seven when I sketched her, in crayon, for the frontispiece of “My Indian Book,” an illustrated collection of one-sentence stories about Native Americans who pray for rain, sing songs, build birch-bark canoes, and await the end of “hungry time.” I was infatuated with Pocahontas and almost certainly had her in mind as I drew. Perhaps I imagined this young woman and I had been sisters in some prelapsarian world. More than forty years later her startled eyes look straight into mine, and she smiles as if to say, It’s all right, you may have my land. My bed. My home. My food. I understand.
On the booklet’s orange cover I drew what I took to be Indian symbols: a cloud fringed with lines of rain, a geometrical tree. Decades later I learned that shapes much like these are etched in giant schist rocks in the middle of the Susquehanna River at the southern end of Lancaster County, where I grew up. The carvings are perhaps a thousand years old and still visible, though you need a boat to get there, and the short voyage is not without its hazards. It takes muscle to get a purchase on a thigh-high ledge halfway up Big Indian Rock, then hoist yourself to the top of the huge boulder, whose surface is scarred with petroglyphs.
Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with Yecker’s Fulton Hall. There is, I believe, a connection, and it has to do with stone.
On the ground floor of the Fulton Theatre, around the corner from the lobby and just outside the women’s room, a smooth interior wall parts to reveal a portion of a second wall, made of limestone, which dates back to the eighteenth century and belonged to the city jail. Downstairs in the theater’s labyrinthine basement, further portions of the old jail wall wind through the greenroom, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms and ushers’ quarters, under the stage and beside the file cabinets that hold financial and other records. When masons first coaxed these chunks of stone from the earth almost three centuries ago and hauled them here to build a prison, the town of Lancaster barely existed (it would not become a city until 1818). A pair of streets, King and Queen, met in a square that held a courthouse and market; a log cabin served as a Catholic chapel, and a stone building with a spire as a Lutheran one. There were a hundred or so private homes, most of them wood. Along the western wall of the new stone jail,
