The Croswell Opera House: Adrian's stage since the Civil War

Audiences have been filing into the same downtown Adrian theater since the year after Appomattox. The Croswell opened in 1866 as the Adrian Union Hall — a multipurpose room for lectures, concerts, and traveling shows — and it has never really stopped. That long, unbroken run is why people call it the oldest theater still operating in Michigan, and one of the oldest in the whole country.

The name belongs to Charles M. Croswell, an Adrian man who went on to become Michigan’s seventeenth governor. After his time in Lansing he bought up shares in the hall, his family ran it, and “Croswell’s Opera House” was what stuck on the marquee.

Like a lot of old halls, it survived by changing with the times. For a stretch of the 1900s it ran as a movie house. By 1967 the building was tired and the movie crowds had thinned, and it came close to being lost — the kind of close where a wrecking ball is a real possibility. A group of Adrian civic leaders bought it instead and brought live theater back to the room. A major renovation around 2016 reopened it in 2017 with better sightlines, modern restrooms, and real wheelchair access, the auditorium now seating roughly 640.

What you get for all that is not a velvet-rope museum piece. It is a working stage that puts up six to eight full musicals a year, spring through December, plus concerts and a high school musical festival in the colder months. You can buy a ticket and sit in a room where people have laughed at the same kind of jokes for more than a century and a half. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places under the mouthful it earned honestly: the Adrian Union Hall–Croswell Opera House.