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Historic place

Historic Homestake Opera House

313 West Main St, Lead, SD

A $250,000 gift from the Homestake Mining Company gave Gilded Age gold miners their own opera house, heated swimming pool, bowling alley, and library — under one roof.

📅 1914–present🏛️ Opera HouseStill hereBuilt 1914
Open on the mapSlide back to 1914

The story

Built 1912-1914 by the Homestake Mining Company as a gift to the town, the Opera House and Recreation Building opened in 1914 at about $250,000. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of company co-founder George Hearst, collaborated on its conception. It housed a 1,000-seat theater alongside a heated indoor pool, a bowling alley, a library, and billiard rooms — amenities most towns its size never had. The company gave it to the City of Lead in 1972; a 1984 fire that started beneath the stage gutted the theater, and a nonprofit society has been restoring it since 2005.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The original building included a heated indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley alongside the theater.
It was a personal project of Phoebe Apperson Hearst.
A 1984 fire that started under the stage gutted the theater, nearly 70 years after it opened.

Connected places

Hearst Free Library

Lead, SD
Phoebe Apperson Hearst

Homestake Hydroelectric Plant No. 1

Spearfish, SD
Lead

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Hearst Free Library

315 West Main St · 41 m away
Phoebe Apperson Hearst gave the miners of Lead a free public library stocked with 10,000 books in dozens of languages —

Black Hills Mining Museum

323 West Main St · 54 m away
Built by more than 100 retired Homestake miners themselves, this museum lets visitors walk through a recreated undergrou

Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)

160 West Main St · 227 m away
The world's most productive gold mine became the deepest underground physics lab in the U.S., where scientists hunt for

Central City

Central City (US-385, Deadwood Gulch) · 1.9 km away
Once a booming gulch town of 3,000 that nearly rivaled Deadwood and Lead, Central City absorbed half a dozen neighboring

Broken Boot Gold Mine

1200 Pioneer Way · 2.8 km away
Opened the same year as the gold rush itself, it barely made money on gold — its real product was fool's gold, sold for

Homestake Slime Plant (Deadwood Mountain Grand)

1906 Deadwood Mountain Drive · 3.8 km away
A gold-processing plant built with Douglas fir beams railed in from Washington State ran until 1973, then sat as a count

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Sourceshttps://www.homestakeoperahouse.org/our-history