Vermont’s old theater curtains tell their tales

Armed with a steam iron, an old sewing machine and a large crew of staff and volunteers, Christine Hadsel is bringing the life back to rolled-up theater curtains that have been gathering dust for almost a century in town halls and local theaters all over Vermont.

The Burlington resident set out four years ago to inventory what she expected to be a dozen or so of the painted canvas curtains that were popular in the early 1900s.

After writing to clerks and historians in every town and putting notices in papers about the missing curtains, Hadsel started hearing back about curtains that were stashed under unused stages; curtains that hadn’t been unrolled in anyone’s memory and curtains that were still being used for theatrical productions in the little towns where they’d been doing duty for 100 years.

Hadsel now knows of at least 125 curtains in 80 towns that have survived into modern times, decades beyond the vaudeville era. Some have been restored; others are torn or badly damaged by water. Reports of newly discovered curtains come in all the time.

“These curtains were an investment in community culture,” she said recently. “It makes me really curious about the kind of entertainment that happened in a place like Sudbury.”