Pettengill Hall to Opera House Inn

BySteve

The Long Life of an Island Falls Landmark

The Opera House was originally called Pettengill Hall, after the owner Columbus L. Pettengill. The clothing store and barber shop were on the first floor, while the second floor hosted everything from town meetings, church services, and religious revivals to vaudeville shows, high school plays, and graduations. Around 1907, a huge rear extension was added for residential quarters and extra business space, and it was quickly expanded into a four-story wing by 1909. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Opera House transitioned heavily into entertainment. It became a premier local cinema, screening silent films before transitioning to modern “talking pictures” as jobs boomed at the local tanneries and starch factories. Closed in the 1960s, the Opera House sat vacant for decades, although it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Local resident Chris Hartin purchased the Opera House in 2020 and operates the building as a pub and eatery, as well as an AirBnB.

Island Falls Opera House, circa 1930

Built by a Lumberman, 1894

Columbus L. Pettengill, an area lumberman, built the original two-story structure in 1894 on a prominent corner lot in the center of the village, at the junction now marked by Old Patten Road, Burleigh Street, and Sewall Street. Known locally as Pettengill Hall, it was a fairly typical example of a building type once common in small Maine towns: retail space on the ground floor, with a general and clothing store and a barber shop, and a large multipurpose hall above for the whole community’s civic and social life. According to some, a smaller “Aroostook Club” meeting room also existed on the building’s top level. It was used as an informal gathering space for local businessmen.

Growth of the Rear Wing, 1906–1909

Growth came quickly. Local memory holds that the rear addition, built onto the original structure between 1906 and 1908, was raised in stages. It began as a two-story annex before a second phase of construction brought it up to four full stories within just a couple of years. The finished wing packed in an unusual mix of uses for its footprint: a two-lane bowling alley in the basement, a feed-and-grain and farm-supply business on the ground floor, and living quarters above with seven bedrooms split across the second and third floors. Local tradition also holds that the top floor, finished and left open, doubled as a ballroom. A surviving photograph dated 1924 shows the completed complex much as it would have appeared through the building’s peak years.

Island Falls Opera House, circa 1924

From Vaudeville Hall to Movie House

Motion pictures arrived at the Opera House in the 1920s, when the second-floor hall that had once hosted vaudeville acts and town meetings was converted into a movie theater. Since the films of that era carried no recorded soundtrack, a musician stationed at a piano near the stage improvised live accompaniment to match the mood of each scene, a common practice at small-town theaters nationwide before the arrival of sound. That transition happened at the Opera House by the late 1920s, when a basic amplification system was installed and operated from a booth tucked in the back of the auditorium.

Trade publications from the era placed the venue’s capacity at around 300 seats, including a balcony section, and by the early 1940s it was still running current releases, including MGM pictures, as one of the region’s local cinemas. Murals painted on the theater’s walls in the 1930s by an artist named Nick Paola, who local accounts say later worked for Walt Disney, have survived and remain visible in the building today.

The theater operated through the peak years of the local tannery and starch-processing industries, which brought steady population and employment to Island Falls in the early 20th century. As those industries declined and new safety and building-code regulations made continued operation increasingly costly, the Pettengill family opted not to invest in modernizing the aging building. The theater closed for good in the late 1960s.

Decades of Vacancy and a National Register Listing

The building remained in Pettengill family ownership until the 1980s, when a couple named Knapp, relocating from Alaska, purchased it and gave it the name “Island Falls Opera House” as a tribute to its performance history. The Knapps opened a short-lived appliance store in the old ground-floor retail space, updated the heating system, and made other preservation improvements. It was the Knapps who successfully nominated the building for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, achieved on July 19, 1984, becoming just the second of what would eventually be three historic buildings recognized in Island Falls.

The Knapps later sold the building back to the Pettengill family, who held it until the mid-1990s, when it was purchased by a woman from southern Maine named Agnes. Agnes lived in the residential wing and invested heavily in the structure, replacing all the windows, enclosing porches around the building, adding insulation and vinyl siding, and removing the old knob-and-tube wiring in favor of modern circuit breakers. She hoped to reopen the theater but was ultimately unable to do so before health issues forced her into a nursing home. The building changed hands a few more times afterward, including one owner who held it for roughly 15 years while it sat vacant.

Restoration Under the Hartin Family

Chris Hartin, owner of a local heating and cooling business, purchased the Island Falls Opera House in December 2020. Hartin, who had moved to the Island Falls area in 2003, said he had long been drawn to the building and wanted to prevent it from being torn down or falling into neglect, aiming instead to restore it as a community gathering space. The Hartin family opened inn rooms for overnight rental in 2021 and opened a lounge, now known as the Red Tape Tavern, in 2022. The building today operates as the Opera House Inn & Lounge, offering short-term lodging, food service, and a bar with local craft beer and cocktails, alongside ongoing efforts to eventually reopen the historic theater stage itself.

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