McClellan Opera House

The plaque's span ends in 1892 because that is the year the opera house burned. Erskine McClellan, a carpenter and town official who planed the trim of his own house on Taos Street by hand, opened his hall here in 1868 and enlarged it into what has been called Colorado's first opera house. Among those who paid for the bronze in 1962 were Barbara and Benjamin Draper. Benjamin wrote the history of Georgetown's cultural life, and in 1929 he had restored McClellan's whip-sawn house, which still stands.

What the plaque says

This memorial is the property of the State of Colorado McClellan Opera House In 1868 Erskine McClellan erected on this site a place of public gathering, McClellan Hall, which he later enlarged, calling it the McClellan Opera House. During the years 1869-1892, the great and the near-great of the theatrical world performed here. Georgetown was a two-night stand on both the silver and gold circuits which played the Colorado mining camps. Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado Barbara and Benjamin Draper the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Colorado and the McClellan Players 1962

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hotel de Paris — steps away
  A French cook's hotel in a silver town, kept for twenty-five years by a man whose name turned out not to be his own.
• Georgetown Loop Railroad — 0.5 mi
  Scrapped in 1939 for $450, rebuilt a century after it first opened, and running again over the bridge that crosses its own track.
• Mount Blue Sky — 8.6 mi
  Rosalie for a painter, Evans for a governor, and since 2023 a name the Cheyenne and Arapaho asked for, at the top of North America's highest paved road.
• Central City Opera House — 12 mi
  Built by a mining town for itself in 1878, outshone by Tabor within four years, and reopened in 1932 with Lillian Gish.

More markers nearby

• Hotel de Paris — steps away
• Georgetown Mining Region — steps away
• Berthoud Pass — 7.7 mi
• South Park — 21 mi