Tabor Opera House

The Tabor Opera House's opening roster made it the finest theater west of the Missouri: Oscar Wilde, Harry Houdini, John Philip Sousa and Buffalo Bill all played its stage. Tabor himself — Leadville's first mayor, briefly a U.S. senator — had meanwhile made his private life a national story by divorcing Augusta for Baby Doe McCourt; the crash that wiped him out left Baby Doe to her own famous ending at the Matchless Mine.

The Elks bought the building in 1901 and ran it as a lodge and hall. By 1954 it faced demolition for a parking lot; Evelyn Furman bought it in 1955 for $20,000 and ran it herself for nearly sixty years, tarring the roof into her seventies. A full restoration followed her 2011 death, and the theater reopened — with original 1879 painted scenery rediscovered upstairs in 2020.

The file's best account is Furman's own. A visitor lingered after one of her tours and told her, seriously, that a heavyset middle-aged man — dark-complected, mustached, a gold watch chain across his vest — had stood beside her under the balcony the whole time she talked. Furman had seen no one. She wrote down the description and found it stopped her cold: 'It fit H.A.W. Tabor perfectly.'

The rest of the inventory is standard theater-file material: a figure in the boxes, a presence on the stage, whispers and applause reported in the empty house. Across town, ghost hunters once claimed a séance poker game with Tabor in the Delaware Hotel's library — a claim the file records without grading.

The construction itself is the record's best paragraph: materials freighted by wagon over the passes, walls of solid brick sixteen inches thick, the first gas lighting in Leadville, hand-painted scenery that survived unrolled upstairs into the twenty-first century. A town at two miles' elevation got a theater that would not have shamed Denver — built by a man who would be dead and broke within twenty years, and who is reportedly still found standing in it. The opera house did not outlast Tabor so much as absorb him: the building is the biography that outlived the bank account.

The opera house today is a restored National Trust National Treasure that sells its builder twice — once in the museum displays, once in the sightings. The man who raised a theater in a hundred days, lost everything in the crash and died with the century is, by the witnesses' account, reportedly still in the audience at 308 Harrison Avenue: the silver king keeping his box seat in the house he could not keep, while the scenery he bought in 1879 hangs upstairs where the restorers found it.