Silent are the songs

STERLING – Sterling, 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes is the 19th president of the United States, a commercial telephone service is being introduced, and Thomas Edison is tinkering with what would be a machine that could record sound, the phonograph.

With only about 5,000 residents in a city roughly a third the size of what it would become, Sterling provided enough prosperity – chiefly through riverfront industry – to allow for expanded entertainment and performance opportunities for its residents. The small town along the Rock River even had the United States’ second-largest distillery at the time, so large that the Internal Revenue Service had an office in town just to keep tabs on the taxes.

While that tax money was music to Uncle Sam’s ears, another building was music to the ears of the city’s residents.

The Academy of Music was established in 1877 at the southeast corner of Locust and Fourth streets. The performance center was Sterling’s place to enjoy fine arts for nearly 65 years, until 1924, when moving pictures came along and the Sterling Theater was built across from it on Fourth.

Shortly after, Sears, Roebuck and Co. moved into the building, but did little to maintain it.



These days, D&E Furniture, which has owned the building for nearly 40 years, uses part of the theater area as storage.

The arts comes to town

The Academy of Music came about as a result of the success of Keystone Works, a Sterling company founded by John A. Galt and George Tracy that manufactured hand corn shellers, hay rakes, broadcast seeders, corn planters, and stalk shredders and cutters.

In 1857, Galt owned a hardware business; he made farm implements as a side business that grew, prompting him to build other buildings 5 years later on the ground that later would become the Academy.

Tracy later acquired the property.

Galt and Tracy, both Sterling residents, sought to lend their names to the arrival of both a hotel and a performance center downtown. Tracy and architect James F. Platt were in charge of building the three-story Academy of Music building in 1877, and his partner built the Galt Hotel across Locust Street the same year (the hotel later became the Miami Hotel; it burned in a fire in 1971).

The Academy took less than a year to finish, and cost $43,000 – $1,064,426.10 in 2020 dollars.

Sights and sounds

Tracy’s building wasn’t just a theater; it had storefronts at street level and suites for other businesses and organizations. It also served as an early post office and housed Sterling’s first library and YMCA.


Just about anything on the fine arts spectrum kept crowds entertained at the Academy – plays, music, spoken word, and even vaudeville, including conductor John Philip Sousa and Eddie Foy and The Seven Little Foys, a vaudeville song-and-dance act.

The theater occupied the top floor, and was accessible through a keyhole entrance near the building’s corner that took patrons to a large staircase from the ground floor – both of which have since been removed. Another entrance was on Fourth Street, where a curved staircase leads to the top floor. A balcony, where the Twin Cities’ wealthier folks sat, was accessible through the Locust Street entrance.

As many as 1,200 people flocked to the theater on Friday and Saturday evenings to see and hear performances. It was considered to be the largest theater in northwest Illinois, and sometimes a stop for acts coming from or going to Chicago.

Helping patrons see the stage was a large green and gold chandelier; it’s still there, as is most of the tin ceiling, but the stage arch has been retooled over the years.

Efforts to modernize only went so far, and when the Sterling Theater was built across the street – at ground level with no steps to climb – and movies started to upstage live productions, the Academy faded away, closed and fell into disrepair.

Decline

Sears soon acquired one of the storefronts and later expanded to the seven others under the building’s cornice, but the retail king had no desire to run a theater. The first two floors were remodeled and the top floor became storage, and stayed that way.

Sears moved to the east end of town in 1980, next door to the former Kroger grocery store, where Goodwill is today, then Doc and Phyllis Clemens, who needed space to expand their small furniture store on Sterling’s north side, moved in and cleaned up the theater area for more organized storage.

They found nothing but trash, and boxes and boxes up toward the bottom of the chandelier, all throughout the seating area.

In fact, according to D&E owner Jack Clemens, a “big shot” Sears executive who had inspected the building saw three cast-iron columns and decided to take them for himself.

“When you look back in history, Sears was the equivalent of what Walmart is today, so they had the money to come into a building like this and tear it all out,” Jack Clemens said. “It was a pretty impressive building in its day.”

The neglect was enough to prevent the theater from ever being restored to its glory days.

Like Sears before them, D&E takes up the entire building, and it remains one of Sterling’s oldest downtown businesses.

Recently, more people have noticed the building’s past. In September, when the beige and maroon cornice needed a paint job, it was decided to also repaint “Academy of Music” in the remaining outline of the original letters, which were made of tin and bolted onto the brick but were removed during Sears’ ownership.

To learn more

Go to sterlingmainstreet.org/explore-downtown/historic-architecture/ to learn more about Sterling’s historic architecture.


Cody Cutter

Cody Cutter

Cody Cutter writes for territorial and specialty magazines in the Sauk Valley. He has covered high school sports in northern Illinois for nearly 20 years in various capacities.