Speaker: Jane Rhoads, Jane is an author and a 2009 Notable Kansas Book award winner!

Frontier Kansas was not a cultural desert. Opera houses were homes to important community events such as dramatic productions, commencements, and traveling theater performances. This presentation explores how settlers arriving from European countries and Eastern U.S. cities brought with them ideas of the cultural life they wanted to establish. An important part of that life involved the construction of opera houses. Whether they were simple or magnificent, these structures were vital to the cultural development of our state.