The Old Nacogdoches Opera House is one of the prominent buildings on Main Street in Nacogdoches. The entire downtown area is considered a historic district and almost all the buildings have plaques giving some of their history. The plaques dedicated to the Opera House are on the side of the building (the white signs in the lower right). One plaque gives the history of the building and the other is a brief biography of Diedrich Anton Wilhelm Rulfs who is frequently referred to as the Master Architect of Nacogdoches.
In about 1831 the Mitchell Hotel, a stagecoach inn, was constructed on the site. In 1889 the property’s owner wanted a place for theatrical companies to stop over as they traveled between Shreveport and Houston and commissioned Rulfs to build an opera house. The ground floor housed the ticket office and a general merchandise establishment and a confectionery shop. The theater was located on the second floor.
The theater did host operatic performances, but the majority of the touring shows were plays, melodramas, occasional burlesques, and magic shows. The Marx Brothers first developed their improvisational style of comedy here. The plaque describes an event involving the Marx Brothers as follows: “During their act around 1907, a disturbance on Main Street caused most of the audience to run to see what was happening. Accounts differ, but either a runaway horse or mule kicked a cart to pieces and dragged it down the street. The Marx Brothers, angered by the loss of their audience, began to race about the stage in a frenzy of comic behavior. Their parody of their own burlesque and their antics on stage brought the audience back and launched a new direction in their comic careers. According to Groucho Marx, this performance even spawned the first Groucho-ism: ‘Nacogdoches is full of roaches.’ He and his brothers were also arrested shortly thereafter for playing euchre, a popular card game, on the porch of their hotel.”
The building ceased to be a theater in 1923. A new owner replaced the original red brick façade with one of less ornamentation and renamed the building the Cason Building. Over the next 80 years it was home to several different retailers and professional offices. In 2001 the D.K. Cason Estate donated the structure to Stephen F. Austin State University’s Real Estate Foundation for an art center and today it houses the Cole Art Center. The Nacogdoches Photography Association holds its monthly meetings on the second floor.
