From the Alwinac: Summer Song: The Ashland (Wisconsin) Grand Opera House

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

I discovered the Ashland Grand Opera House on a recent trip to the Chequamegon Bay area on the southern shores of Lake Superior. A city of about 8,000 inhabitants, Ashland, Wisconsin, was founded in 1854. For a time it was the third busiest Great Lakes port, behind Chicago and Buffalo, with ships loaded with northern Wisconsin pine, brownstone, and iron ore departing from Ashland to supply the rest of the Midwest and points beyond. The central ore dock was, at the time of its completion in 1925, the largest concrete structure of its kind in the world….
    We first learned of the ore dock on a tour through the streets of downtown Ashland, where more than twenty expansive murals adorn as many facades, each visualizing a chapter in the story of Ashland and its citizens….
    One of the murals is a tribute to local railroad workers and located near the former train depot, an impressive brownstone structure two blocks south of Main on 3^rd Ave. W. As we walked along 3^rd Ave., a smaller building on the east side of the street caught my attention. A painted, poster-like sign identified it as the Ashland Grand Opera House. An attempt had been made to visualize a fanciful operatic scene through mural art on a more miniature scale. The familiar likeness of famed operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti in full voice covers an upper window, while a Wagnerian soprano holds forth from another. The boarded-up doors, no doubt leading to the second-story performance space, and twin abandoned store-fronts on the ground level make the prolonged disuse of the building painfully apparent. But the signage seems an encouraging indication that the opera house is still a source of local pride in Ashland….
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean