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Kilgore Hall continued to be the home of the mainstream, more respectable theatre, even after it changed hands In 1869. In 1868, the Doily Herald taunted Steubenville because the opera diva Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, who was touring the United States with her Grand English Opera Company, played Pittsburgh and Wheeling but snubbed Steubenville for lack of "a hall suitable." She was not being a prima donna, despite the fact that she was, well, a prima donna; Kilgore's stage, the best in the city, simply could not accommodate the huge, multiple sets that a major opera company transported by train.
The following year H. G. Garrett, a prosperous dry goods merchant who was also founder and treasurer of the Union Deposit Bank in Steubenville, was outraged at the insult to his city and decided to do something about it. He bought Kilgore Hall and completely renovated the stage, expanding it to fifty feet wide and thirty-one deep, with ten flats for scenery, trapdoors in the floor and trapeze moorings on the ceiling. Garrett doubled the number of gas jets for lighting to eighty and increased the seating capacity to one thousand. The resulting Garrett's Hall could now stage any production that any eastern road company could throw Its way.
For about a decade. Garrett's Hall (later Gray & Garrett's) was the only home in Steubenville of large theatrical and operatic productions from New York and Boston. In 1882, however, Steubenville's city council took a gamble. Convinced that the city could support more than one full-size opera house, the council voted to expand the city market building by adding an upper floor—In the form of a fully equipped opera house. City Solicitor Charles H. Reynolds ran the opera house for its first year. The grand opening was the hit of the New York stage, the melodrama Lights o'London, on August 27 and 28. Reynolds struck on an ingenious method of ensuring a large local audience. All of the leads were New York and London professionals, but the director came early to engage and rehearse local actors and singers for the chorus. All of Steubenville turned out to see family, friends and neighbors in a "New York show."
Remembering Steubenville: