Floating Theatre
- Charles Thrasher
- Feb 2
- 9 min read
The storm that struck the Chesapeake Bay on July 4, 1920, was likely incited by the strong updraft of hot air over the Piedmont colliding with a weak cold front sagging southeast from the Appalachians. The steep pressure gradient over the Bay created severe line squalls, winds perhaps 50 to 70 miles per hour, continuous lightning, and localized gusts of descending wind called downbursts. Three-to-five-foot waves rose almost instantly from a standing start.
The Playhouse was caught by the storm when under tow near Tangier Island, the widest part of the Bay. The tow rope for the 128-foot barge parted.
One of the barge’s two tugs developed engine trouble and couldn’t be steered. She became a hazard to the other tug attached by a breast line and had to be cut free.
The crew of the Playhouse scrambled to set three anchors totaling 1400 pounds.
Selba Adams, brother of the owner of the Playhouse, leaped from the remaining tug as it came alongside the barge, both vessels pitching and yawing. He sprawled across the deck, striking his head, and was saved from falling overboard by a crew member.
During the maneuver, the two vessels were thrown together. The tug was holed above the waterline and had to run before the storm to reach a boatyard for repairs.
The Playhouse was left alone. She pitched in the waves, her anchor rodes bar tight. Waves broke over her second story roof. She hoisted distress signals. A fishing boat came to help but suffered damage and was towed back to the lee of Tangier Island by another fishing boat.
At dawn of the next day two fishing boats came from Tangier Island and towed the Playhouse to the safety of Reedsville harbor. As soon as she made landfall, half the theatre’s company, including the cook, abruptly quit. [1]
The Launching
The Playhouse was built in Chauncey’s shipyard, on the banks of the Pamlico River in Washington. Chauncey took over the shipyard when Joseph Farrow died in 1906. (See Farrow Shipyard for details.)
She was commissioned by James Adams, a pioneer in the carnival business, who was no stranger to Washington. Several years earlier, as a high diver, he fell from a 90-foot ladder while performing in Washington, ending his career as a performer. [2]
The Playhouse was one of the most unique vessels ever built on the South Atlantic coast—128-feet long, 32-feet wide, with an auditorium 30 by 80 feet and a balcony running all the way around the room. Folding opera chairs accommodated 500 people. The “…balcony is reserved for colored people and will seat 350 persons,” wrote the Washington Daily News. [3]
She was fitted with a telephone system running throughout the boat. As well, hot and cold running water, steam heating and an electric light plant. [4] A thousand-gallon boiler supplied all but the drinking water. [5]
The Playhouse was originally named the Estelle at her launch on Tuesday afternoon, January 17, 1914. A crowd gathered on the riverfront to watch as she slid down the railway into the river. By February 25, Adams had renamed her Playhouse, the name painted on her bluff bows, the name registered with the Bureau of Navigation. [6]
With no audience onboard, she drew only 14-inches of water which allowed her to berth at the shallow river and tidewater ports of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. [7]
Even so, she almost missed her first performance at Fowle’s wharf in Washington.
First Performance
After her launch, her internal fittings and furniture were installed at the shipyard. On Monday, March 2, they moved the Playhouse from Chauncey’s shipyard to Fowle’s wharf for the opening performance. Even though she drew only 14-inches of water, she ran hard aground before coming alongside the wharf. The wind must have blown the water out from the Washington waterfront. (There is no lunar tide on the Pamlico River.)
A crowd gathered on the wharf, impatiently waiting to buy tickets. The wind must have died because the water returned just in time to bring the boat alongside and start the performance as scheduled. The evening was a great success. [8]
Belinda Selby of Aurora remembered that the Playhouse had a bear onboard. The Washington Daily News made no mention of the bear but Miriam Haynie in her history of Reedville, Virginia quoted resident Carrol Vanlandingham: “When the floating theatre tied up they used to have a big black bear they would put on the wharf—chained to his cage. He would drink Coca-Colas as fast as you gave them to him. He was in a wrestling act in the show. [9]
Not long after she left Washington, Jim Adams was officially informed that a barge such as the Playhouse had to have identification painted on the sides of her superstructure. Shortly after, “James Adams Floating Theatre” was painted in bold letters on either side of her second story. For the next 19 years, she was known as the Floating Theatre, or more simply, the showboat.
They Don’t Know Bad Acting
It would be 10 years before the James Adams Floating Theatre returned to Washington. Typically, she moved at night between ports, coming up the river brightly lit from bow to stern, “a fairyland site” one author wrote. [10]
The band often played on the upper deck when the Floating Theatre made port. It was like a circus parading through town to announce its arrival. “They don’t know bad acting,” Jim Adams said of the theatre’s audience, “but they know bad music.” The theatre always had an excellent orchestra. [11]
In the ten years she had been away from Washington, the Floating Theatre had called throughout Albemarle Sound and the tidewater ports of North Carolina, the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia and Maryland, bringing theater and vaudeville to rural communities, many of which had barely passable roads, but her voyages were not without hazard.
The Floating Theatre was built solidly. Beams without scarfs ran the 128-foot length of the boat. Her bottom planks were thirty-two-foot long and four-inches thick. Twenty-seven-inch drift bolts were placed every two feet. But even her heavy construction wasn’t enough to protect her on Thanksgiving, November 24, 1927.
A History of Shipwreck
The Floating Theatre was under tow by the steam tug W. H. Hoodless crossing the lower Chesapeake Bay, bound for her winter quarters in Elizabeth City, when she struck a submerged object with sufficient force to stove a 20 square foot hole in her bottom. Captain Miller of the W. H. Hoodless tried to drag her toward shallow water but was hampered by wind and seas and the two other vessels he also had in tow.
He radioed the Coast Guard for help. They sent the cutter Carrabasset and two patrol boats but were unable to prevent the Floating Theatre from sinking in sixteen feet of water four miles southeast of Thimble Shoals Light on the approach to Norfolk Harbor.
The Coast Guard threatened to destroy the wreck if it remained in place. It was a hazard to navigation in a heavily trafficked area, but two days of high wind and heavy seas delayed any salvage effort and ripped apart the barge’s superstructure. It was finally raised on Sunday.
The W. H. Hoodless towed the Floating Theatre, barely floating and still full of water, to the Norfolk Shipyard. She dragged across the bottom of Norfolk Harbor, cutting two gas lines running across the Elizabeth River between Norfolk and Berkley. She also cut the Western Union telegraph cable “carrying wires to the entire south and part of the north.” [12]
She was made seaworthy and towed to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where extensive repairs were made to her ruined superstructure and fittings. She emerged better than new if you believed the advertisements. She did good business for two more years, until she sank again.
The Dismal Swamp
The Floating Theatre had no engine. She was most often towed between ports by two tugs. Trouper was the smaller tug, powered by a 30-horsepower gasoline engine. Elk was 47.8 feet long, 12 feet wide, with a draft of 5.2 feet, powered by a 70-horsepower gasoline engine. [13]
The Trouper and Elk were towing her that day in 1920 when she was caught by the abrupt storm near Tangier Island. The Elk was also towing her on November 16, 1929 when she was impaled on a snag in the Dismal Swamp Canal a half mile below the South Mills locks.
The boat’s momentum drove her port bow high on the snag. The great weight gradually crushed her hull. She settled to the bottom, completely blocking passage of the canal.
The Elizabeth City Daily Advance reported: “As it now lies it has a list of about 35 to 40 degrees to starboard at the bow, which still rests upon the stump, with a flatter angle at the stern, giving the whole structure a twist which has caused the roofing to buckle over the entire length. The water on the low side reached almost to the balcony deck and the interior is flooded, unsecured furniture and odds and ends of timber floating in the auditorium.”
Grover Hill spent two days in the cold water of the canal in a diver’s dress, groping blindly in the black water, and sealed 17 holes in the hull below the water line. A watertight bulkhead was built around the jagged hole made by the snag. The pumps were started, discharging 2,100 gallons of water per minute, and the hull rose reluctantly from the bottom of the canal.
She was slowly towed to Elizabeth City. The warped hull of the barely Floating Theatre was unwieldy and troublesome to tow, especially through the narrow draw of the Norfolk and Southern Railroad bridge. The pumps ran continuously, discharging water leaking through her sprung planks.
Jim Adams considered suing the operators of the Dismal Swamp Canal but didn’t have a case. The canal wasn’t officially open for traffic. Boat owners were allowed to use it at their own risk. [14]
After 19 years bringing theatre to the backwaters of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, James Adams sold the Floating Theatre in May 1933.
Final Curtain
The new owner was Nina Howard, a widow from St. Michaels, Maryland. She had followed the Floating Theatre in her small yacht, the Jennie M. II, mixing with the theater folk, enjoying the drama, but she bought the Floating Theatre for her unofficially adopted son to manage.
The name on the side was changed to “The Original Floating Theater” and she was repainted red, but otherwise much remained the same for another eight years, In May 1941, Ms. Howard sold the barge and the two tugs, Trouper and Elk, to E. H. Brassell of Savanah. Brassell owned a commercial towing company. The demand for towing was increasing because of the escalating wars in Europe and Asia. He bought the Floating Theater to convert to a barge, but he was mostly interested in the tugs.
On November 14, 1941, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Floating Theater was towed across the Savannah River to slip No. 2 at the Seaboard terminals where she was to be converted to a barge, her superstructure demolished. She caught fire under tow.
The fire spread from bow to stern rapidly, allowing little time for the crew onboard to scramble to the safety of the tugs alongside. It may have been that oil and gas spilled from the generators over the years had pooled in the bilges, providing fuel for the fire.
The Seaboard ferry Island Girl and the Atlantic Towing Company tug, William F. McCauley, both fitted with fire-fighting gear, responded within minutes. E. H. Brassel, the owner of the Floating Theater, arrived shortly after onboard the diesel tug Gwendolyn.
The fire burned so brightly that a crowd gathered on the municipal wharf to watch.
It wasn’t possible to put the fire out. Flames were gushing from all the openings topside. She was drifting toward the Seaboard wharves. The tugs abandoned the effort to fight the fire and worked at pushing the burning hulk toward the isolation of Seaboard No. 1 slip.
“Last night when the tide dropped the vessel grounded in the mud in the slip while the flames ate lower and lower along her hull. She was burning in the mud flat when the tide left here entirely, and late last night only a few smoldering heavy timbers remained of the once palatial showboat.” [15]
The James Adams Floating Theatre had come to a dramatic end.
Usage
James Adams followed the English colloquial spelling of theatre in naming the James Adams Floating Theatre, perhaps because it sounded more sophisticated. Nina Howard renamed it the Original Floating Theater, the spelling favored in the United States.
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