WASHINGTON OPERA HOUSE
This elegant theater at 116 W. Second St. in Maysville was constructed in 1851, on the site of the former Old Blue Church (Presbyterian). It is the fifth-oldest theater of this sort in the United States. In 1898 the Opera House was gutted by fire, and the local Washington Fire Company rebuilt it, at a cost of $24,000. It was renamed the Washington Opera House in honor of the fire company. Over the years, many of the nation’s great performers graced the opera house’s stage. Tom Mix, John Phillips Sousa and his band, and John L. Sullivan. With convenient steamboat and, later, railroad connections, the Washington Opera House was an easy one-night-stand for acts traveling to and from Cincinnati. The building later became a movie house, owned by Falmouth mayor Max Goldberg. By the mid-1950s, the legend was well established that the house was haunted by a young girl named Mary, who supposedly had fallen through a trap door while performing in the building, broken her neck, and died.
In 1962 the theater became home to the newly formed Maysville Players, a local theatrical group that opened its first season with the Thornton Wilder classic Our Town. Eventually, the Players acquired ownership of the building and hundreds of plays have been staged there since. Today, the Maysville Players is the oldest group of its kind in the state.
The Maysville Players raised $2.9 million for restoration of the theater, which included new heating and air-conditioning, restrooms, an elevator, new seats, floors, and sundry other improvements. The restored theater reopened with a black-tie gala celebration on November 25, 2006.
The Historic Washington Opera House’s Wikipedia entry.
Above excerpted from page 937 – 938 of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NORTHERN KENTUCKY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY ISBN 978-0-8131-2565-7