Garrettsville Opera House

Garrettsville had two opera houses in its history. The city’s first opera house called the Garrettsville Opera House was built in 1889 (alongside a clock tower in 1907) as an original home for the local Bulk Oil Company that later became the Village Council. It was constructed in massive stone and brick Gothic that housed a 600-seat movie theater in the main building was also added, as well as a both police and fire station, a jail, and council chambers in the basement. The original clock tower housed a 3,200-pound fire bell with a 50-pound clapper manufactured by the E. Howard Clock Company of Boston, Massachusetts, and had been idle and collecting dust in the Opera House tower for years. It was obtained in 1907 after the Garrettsville Business Association conducted two fund raising campaigns to install the clock in memory of Mrs. Elisha Garrett. Two campaigns were necessary to raise the $1,100 in total because the proceeds were stolen after the first campaign.

Unfortunately the Garrettsville Opera House was condemned in 1955 and was razed in September 1964. A fire station was originally planned to be built on its site but was completely scrapped. Linda Pinney, member of the then-newly-formed Garrettsville Historical Society, told the Akron Beacon Journal in January 1982 that she remembered watching movies there as a young child and was one of those people who saw the fall of the Garrettsville Opera House, crying in tears to death.

Exactly eight years later in 1972, she started a campaign to build a tower in dedication to the old Garrettsville Opera House which would’ve cost $8,000 in total for the construction. After a few years of attempts, it worked. Although it costed $22,000 (plus an extra $3,000 for landscaping) for the clock’s construction, she raised enough money by conducting bake sales and strawberry socials even knocking on people’s front doors asking for donations, and later in the year, she decorated five houses as well as serving in the ticket booth in the 1974 Garrettsville Christmas Walk through the sales of $2 tickets raised for $15,000.

The memorial clock tower was built on the site of the former opera house in 1976. Ned Lansinger, a longtime Kent and Garrettsville jeweler and clock tower operator for the old house, began repairing the clock in February 1976 for the first time since its closure. According to Lansinger himself, he remembers walking up the 80-step stairway every Monday morning to wind the clock to keep it on time, as well as a 750-pound weight that operated the striking mechanism. Lansinger had been working at the clock house since 1938, but unfortunately, the original clock went silent for two weeks in 1952 due to him battling a siege of the flu. He also served in World War I as well as a past master of the Garrettsville Lodge and the former president of the Rotary Club.

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