Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton

and articles he published in an effort to educate American consumers. “It speaks of the inhabitant as a man of wealth, who wishes in a quiet way to enjoy his wealth. It speaks of him as a person of educated and refined tastes, who can appreciate the beautiful both in art and nature.”

      I can imagine Hager’s delight at seeing himself in just this light, a man of means and polish, a first-generation American who had reached the heights of civic leadership and could now extend his good taste to the community. It’s little wonder he and Sloan hit it off. (A year later, Hager would help hire Sloan to design an ornate new pulpit at Trinity Lutheran.) To the architect, Hager was an ideal client: a man of independent thought and strong opinion, one of those thrusting, inquisitive personalities who were reshaping the cultural life of the United States.

      The two would first have talked about what Hager wanted: a multipurpose building flexible enough to accommodate the communal needs of a flourishing populace, a place of elegance, European in feel and look. Sloan would have drawn up floor plans, then elevations measured to scale, and finally a sketch showing the hall as it would look “in nature” from a given perspective. That drawing, now on display in the office of the Fulton’s managing director, reveals a square edifice whose milky façade rises in ever more delicate layers toward an airy cupola. Hager must have exulted when he first held the sketch in his hands. The front of Sloan’s hall is symmetrical but not monotonous, a pleasing blend of angles and arches, reason and sentiment. The heavy stone blocks of its first two floors give way to smooth plaster and a pitched roof with deep eaves held up by the Grecian cornices Sloan loved. The architect was designing for posterity: “We Americans are not ashamed that we have nothing now venerable in years,” he wrote in 1852, the year he designed Fulton Hall, “but we may fear that our descendants will have cause so to be, and have few buildings to point out, saying, this is the work of our fathers.”

      Sloan and Hager agreed that the stage inside the hall would face east, as altars traditionally do, and that the side and back walls of the building would be constructed of economic brick. They also agreed to retain as much of the old prison complex as necessary to support the new structure. The architect knew stone to be the best foundation for any building, and the jail walls had already withstood nearly a century of wind, heat, rain, and ice without cracking, so he left whole stretches of James Webb’s masonry intact, including a two-story extension, with a vaulted double door, at the rear of the building on Water Street.

      At the opposite end of the site, toward Prince Street, Sloan installed heavy log piers to help buttress his hall. The property itself was wildly uneven. Architect Dick Levengood, who took part in a late twentieth-century renovation of the Fulton Theatre, speaks of the “large-grade differential from the front of the building to the rear”—the site drops as much as fifteen feet from Prince Street to Water—and says the lot is “very challenging. It turns all the way around the corner, it drops both ways.” Webb had already figured out how to build on the site “so you don’t mess with it.”

      Hager took out a permit to construct Fulton Hall in early May 1852, and work began at once. He told reporters the new building would be ready in four months. It was hot, and at least one worker was felled by sunstroke. Teenage boys hung around the construction site, hoping to catch sight of the dungeon, where a prisoner was said to have starved 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.