Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton
had once felt as I had standing here on this wooden stage, waiting for the lights to dim? Invincible. Reverent. Possessed by a god I am still trying to find.
In his 1827 preface to Cromwell, Victor Hugo wrote that the place where a catastrophe occurs becomes forever afterward a “silent character” in a tragic tale. It is doubtful Christopher Hager thought much about tragedy or character as he ordered workmen to begin dismantling Lancaster’s old jail and workhouse in the summer of 1852, although he did hire a sometime church architect to design the hall he intended to build on the site—an unconscious nod, perhaps, to the gravity of his undertaking.
Hager’s portrait hangs upstairs in the offices of today’s Fulton Theatre, and I’ve studied it more than once, trying to see in the Hapsburg nose and pinched mouth the template for the Hager men I have known in my own lifetime: Christopher’s great-grandson Nat, who did much to save the Fulton from the wrecking ball in the 1960s, and Nat’s son Chris, my old college classmate and friend, who has done his share of backstage work at the Fulton and is the seventh generation of Hager to have served on the vestry of Trinity Lutheran Church. The family’s long sojourn in Lancaster began on September 26, 1764, nine months after the slaughter of the Conestogas, when young Stoffel Heger, a butcher from Hessen-Darmstadt, arrived in the city after crossing the Atlantic with a shipload of fellow immigrants and swearing allegiance to King George the Second. Fourteen years later, Heger—by then Christopher Hager—signed a second oath, renouncing his allegiance to the king and swearing loyalty to the new and independent Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The butcher Hager had three successive wives and eight children, including a boy named Christopher, born in 1800 and baptized, like his siblings, at Trinity Lutheran Church. This second Christopher Hager, the eventual builder of Fulton Hall, was eighteen when his father died and was buried in a small yard adjoining the stately brick sanctuary where two centuries later members of the Hager family would continue to worship. (Not long ago I watched my friend Chris play Jesus in a vacation Bible school pageant at Trinity Lutheran.)
In 1821, three years after his father’s death, Christopher Hager Jr. opened a store near Lancaster’s market and jail and began selling dry goods, queensware, and groceries. His prices were fair, and his buying trips to Philadelphia yielded bargains: a shipment of coffee drenched but not damaged by seawater, a hundred barrels of molasses. Business bloomed. He began extending credit to his customers, and farmers started to invest their cash surpluses with him, making Hager a banker as well as a merchant. He issued loans to friends and family, expanded his store, bought real estate, and perfected a baroque signature not unlike John Hancock’s. In time Hager became president of the Farmers National Bank, president of a volunteer fire company, county treasurer, a manager of the city gas company, a trustee of the local college, an officer in the Lancaster County Colonization Society, and a founder and early manager of the Conestoga Cotton Mills, Lancaster’s midcentury leap into the Industrial Revolution.
Hager wore his sideburns low and his dark hair swept forward onto his face. His nose was long and pronounced, his eyes brown, and when he had his portrait painted shortly after his wedding to the former Catherine Sener, he donned a creamy yellow waistcoat and black jacket. Over the course of their forty-six-year marriage, Christopher and Catherine Hager had ten children, three of whom went into business with their father. When I was a kid, Christopher’s great-grandson Nat was still running Hager’s Department Store.
Christopher Hager grew up in a subsistence culture and helped create an urban one. The Lancaster of his youth—capital of Pennsylvania from 1789 to 1812, and briefly a candidate for the nation’s capital—was a mostly agrarian community whose six thousand inhabitants, half of them German, half English, lived in one- and two-story brick homes on unpaved streets shaded by trees and watered by tributaries of the Conestoga River. In its size and scope, the place was almost medieval. The chief industry in the surrounding county was flour milling. Lancaster itself had a market and courthouse, a dozen or so churches, and at least as many taverns, where itinerant players sometimes put on shows. (In the year of Hager’s birth, a Pennsylvania actor named John Durang performed an “Indian War and Scalp Dance” for the state governor at the Sign of the White Horse, on King Street, a stone’s throw from the workhouse where the Conestogas perished.)
By the time Hager reached middle age, the town of Lancaster had become a city with a population of more than twelve thousand and what one resident remembered as “nothing but bustle and confusion, arrivals and departures of cars, stages, carriages, hacks, drays, and wheelbarrows, with hundreds of people, and thousands of tons of merchandise.” Paved streets, lit by gas, were home to multistory banks, stores, churches, a telegraph office, and the city’s first lager brewery. Rail lines and a new canal, plied by a steamboat called the Conestoga, linked the inland city to Philadelphia and Baltimore. There was talk of building a bigger courthouse and a new jail. The old colonial prison on Prince Street had run out of space, and besides, the citizens of Lancaster were tired of having inmates in their midst—criminals petty and grave, debtors, drunks, Negroes fleeing slavery. Children on their way to school used to see prisoners gazing forlornly from the building’s grated windows, and everyone agreed that was too much. So work began on a new and much larger jail on the city’s east end.
The new facility, a massive sandstone fortress that looked like a castle, opened in the fall of 1851, and the following spring, officials put Lancaster’s now-vacant “old Bastile” up for sale. Christopher Hager submitted the highest bid—$8,400, roughly $250,000 in 2013 currency. Within a month of purchasing the prison complex, he announced his intention to erect a four-story public hall in its stead, to be used for meetings, conventions, lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and plays—a secular place of congregation for the residents of the city whose prosperity was so vital to his and his family’s interests. He also disclosed the name of the building he intended to construct on the site of the old prison and workhouse: Fulton Hall, in honor of the late Robert Fulton, the Lancaster County–born engineer and inventor whose inventions were fueling Hager’s century.
In early American villages, the meetinghouse “determined the character and limits of the community,” Lewis Mumford writes in his early twentieth-century survey of American architecture, Sticks and Stones. “Around the meeting-house the rest of the community crystallized in a definite pattern, tight and homogeneous.” As the American village morphed into a city, its need to retain a sense of community grew. Town halls—the nineteenth-century equivalent of the colonial meetinghouse—were crucial to that effort.
Although he left no public explanation of his reasons for wanting to build Fulton Hall, the canny Christopher Hager seems to have grasped instinctively what Mumford, citing Plato’s Republic, teaches in his book: that “an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing.” Hager saw that his expanding city required a new gathering place where members of the community could forge bonds that were neither religious nor legal but rather social, cultural, and political, and that, furthermore, such a building could, in its very appearance and configuration, be an instructive and edifying force.
Enter Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia. Thirty-seven, brash and opportunistic, a quick learner who had begun his career as a carpenter and risen to architect, the man Hager chose to design Fulton Hall possessed no formal training but had what both men believed the profession required: taste, sensitivity, discrimination, and a vast fund of practical knowledge of the sort that defined so much of nineteenth-century American enterprise. Sloan understood masonry, joinery, carpentry, plastering, and painting; he knew why Grecian moldings were superior and that if you were to avoid lawsuits, you had to sign an airtight contract.
His models, like those of so many of his peers, were European—Palladio, Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren. When it came to style, Sloan preferred the Italianate. “Its great pliability of design, its facile adaptation to our wants and habits, together with its finished,