Ghosthunting Virginia by Michael J. Varhola

Author:Michael J. Varhola
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781578603718
Publisher: Clerisy Press
Published: 2008-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

IN 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, an actor named Robert Porterfield, along with many of his colleagues, was out of work and hungry in New York City. He decided to return to his home region of southwestern Virginia, where food was still plentiful. Once there, he launched an innovative enterprise that both brought entertainment to the people of the isolated mountainous region and allowed himself and his friends to survive in their chosen vocation. It was to become the great work of his life—and, some people believe, has continued beyond it.

“With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh,” was the slogan of the theatre when it opened June 10, 1933. Price of admission to the aptly named Barter Theatre was thirty-five cents or the equivalent in produce, and the concept of trading “ham for Hamlet” caught on quickly with the local people (who, presumably, were not induced to laugh at the gloomy Dane despite the various catch phrases of the institution). “At the end of the first season,” according to the theatre’s published history, “the Barter Company cleared $4.35 in cash, two barrels of jelly, and enjoyed a collective weight gain of over three hundred pounds.”

Porterfield established his theatre in a building that had originally been constructed in 1831 as a Presbyterian church. Just six years later, it was acquired by the “Sons of Temperance,” an anti-drinking organization that used it for various events in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, during which the building was caught up in some of the fighting that swept through the town of Abingdon. And, in the decade after the war, while it was still known as “Temperance Hall,” it was used on January 14, 1876, for its first theatrical performance, a production of The Virginian.

In 1890, the town of Abingdon acquired the building from the Sons of Temperance and converted it into a town hall, jail house, and fire station. One of the improvements made during this era was the addition of a fire siren on the roof of the building, which remained there even after it became a theatre and would sometimes sound during its performances. When this would happen, the actors on stage would freeze in place until it had stopped and then would resume their performance where it had been interrupted (a tradition that continued for more than six decades, until 1994, when the fire department shifted over to a new system for alerting firefighters).

Porterfield spared no effort to make the luxurious, five-hundred-seat Barter Theatre a success in the four decades that he directed it. One of the stories most often told about his dedication involves the old Empire Theatre in New York City, which had been built in 1875 and in 1953 was slated to be demolished and replaced with an office building. Porterfield obtained permission to remove all that he could from the doomed theatre but only had one weekend in which to

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