Don't you think it's curious sometimes the way things turn out? Right now, you should be at the corner of McLean and Jefferson Streets in Bloomington, looking northwest.
It'd be curious if you were asking yourself, what's this has to do with me and the theater? But it does. And it's life's little oddities like this that always amused me.
Now, you probably know that the only house I ever owned is in Springfield. And you may also know that I once owned two lots here in Bloomington. It's these here, the first two west of McLean on the north side of Jefferson. Officially, they are called Lots Eleven and Twelve of the Evans Addition to the town.
I bought them from Judge Davis' cousin, Levi Davis, and his wife, Lucy, of Alton. I paid three hundred twenty-five dollars and eight cents for them on October six, eighteen and fifty-one. And I sold them at a profit of seventy-four dollars and ninety-two cents five and a half years later on April twelve, eighteen and fifty-six to Francis Thomas. A year later, after building houses on the lots, Thomas sold them again.
Now you're probably asking yourself, what's he getting at here? Well, I'm about to tell you. To me, what makes these lots most important in the history of Bloomington is who bought one of those houses in eighteen hundred and eighty-seven, had it torn down, and then had a much larger house put up.
It was Dr. Marie Louise Crothers, wife of Dr. Eli K. Crothers of the Chicken Bone Case and mother of Rachel Crothers. Now, Rachel Crothers grew up in the house that was built on the property that I once owned, went on to graduate from the state normal school that I helped Jesse Fell get started, and then became one of the country's most successful playwrights. Now, you see the curiousness in all this?
As you know, I always enjoyed going to the theater, and it had considerable influence in my life, especially there at the last of it. And Rachel Crothers had a considerable influence on the American stage, averaging one Broadway success a year for thirty-one years in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Interesting, isn't it, how much history you can find out if you just look for it in a small piece of ground?
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