Spearfish’s affection for its historic opera house is perhaps best reflected by residents’ commitment to full-scale, first class restoration. Most work was completed in time for the opera house’s December, 2006 centennial celebration.

The first calls for saving and restoring Matthews Opera House came in the 1960s, the very period when scores of old theaters elsewhere were razed or converted to other uses. Spearfish instead embraced the prospect of staging summer theater in the opera house. Eight years into a summer theater series Black Hills State College dramatic arts director, Darrell Woolwine, put students to work in 1973 patching the ceiling, painting faded walls a bright blue, and hauling in more than 200 wooden auditorium chairs (the chairs, nearly 50 years old at the time, were surplus after the college’s Woodburn Hall was refurbished).

In 1985 the Spearfish Downtown Association took the first steps toward complete restoration that would transform the opera house from a summer-only operation to one that would support year-round programming, with modern heating and air conditioning. The Association tacked a leaky roof that required much more than patchwork. Inspectors found the building remarkably sound structurally, and in 1989 new exits and electrical infrastructure brought the opera house up to safety codes. The blue walls and old seating made exits, replaced by white walls and temporary, portable chairs. Actors appreciated a new and sturdy stage floor.

The Matthews Opera House Society grew out of the Downtown Association and attracted funding from a loyal membership, bingo games, benefit musicals, and the city’s hospitality tax revenues. The building’s owners, the Kelley family, generously signed a 99-year, rent-free lease contingent on complete restoration. The project’s most dramatic phase, in 1997, brought the second-story opera house into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, thanks to an elevator. The entrance was reconfigured, new restrooms were built, and dressing rooms and stage lighting were enhanced. And hard as it may be for those who have come to know the opera house recently to visualize, there was no lobby prior to 1997. Volunteers ripped out old apartment and office units to open the space and expose the tall windows that dominate today’s lobby.

As the centennial year approached, Tom Matthews and his wife Theresa stepped forward. Tom is the great-grandson of the opera house’s builder, and he and Theresa possess remarkable building restoration skills. They researched the auditorium’s original colors and brought them back, and they repaired plaster and woodwork damaged by a century of lively activity.

The most comfortable seating the opera house has ever known was delivered just three months before the centennial celebration. It’s portable so the flat auditorium can be used for dances, art shows, and other functions. Paul Higbee