Look for the building with the striking metal corrugated siding shaped into those distinctive green ridges, the steep sloped roof, and that towering neon sign vertically spelling out Orpheum. I am so thrilled to share the incredible story of this place with you! Today it is a beloved concert venue, but the Orpheum Theater actually started out as a bizarre agricultural experiment.
A local pioneer named John W. Weatherford initially fenced this very lot to raise chickens, hoping to supply his nearby hotel guests with fresh eggs. But the harsh winters forced him to artificially heat the coop, an absolute financial disaster that ended with him hosting a massive town wide chicken dinner sale to clear the lot for entertainment. In nineteen eleven, he replaced his failed poultry farm with the Majestic Opera House, bringing the very first movies to Flagstaff.
Things went perfectly until the early hours of January first, nineteen fifteen. Just hours after a packed crowd of New Year revelers left the building, a record breaking snowstorm dumped over five feet of snow, causing the roof and walls to completely cave in under the crushing weight.
Weatherford was totally desperate to salvage his livelihood from the ruins. While his frustrated business partners abandoned him, Weatherford reportedly paid a young boy to crawl directly into the dangerous, collapsed wreckage to retrieve his prized movie projector. It is humbling to consider the hidden sacrifices of unnamed people, like that brave kid navigating crushed beams and unstable rubble. That single terrifying act of childhood bravery was the only thing that kept this frontier dream alive.
Weatherford stubbornly refused to give up, tapping into that true frontier grit, and rebuilt a much grander one thousand seat venue in nineteen seventeen, naming it the Orpheum.
The new theater soon found its most vital champion when a woman named Mary Costigan stepped up to take full control of the operation in nineteen twenty. She transformed the theater into a bustling community hub for war bond sales and fundraisers, eventually making history in nineteen twenty five as the first woman in Arizona to own and operate a radio station, broadcasting directly from this building.
Over the decades, this place has seen everything from quiet scientific victories, like astronomer Clyde Tombaugh privately celebrating his discovery of the planet Pluto here in nineteen thirty, to a terrifying amount of paranormal activity. Late night janitors have repeatedly spotted a shadowy figure gliding through the aisles long after the doors were locked.
But the real story here is the sheer willpower of a community refusing to let its history die, recently banding together to urge the city to buy the building and save it from the wrecking ball forever.
Now, let us head just a one minute walk down the street to see John Weatherford's most prominent surviving legacy, the stunning Weatherford Hotel.
