The Church Hill Theatre in Queen’s Anne County recently received a Heritage Fund grant to repair cracks in it’s exterior stucco work. As a cultural and entertainment hub for the community, the organization turned their performances into fundraisers, too, to continue to care for their historic buildings.
HISTORY OF THE THEATRE
The Church Hill Theatre provides a home for the performing arts in the Queen Anne’s County town of Church Hill. The theater is a 1929 building that hosted live performances and town meetings until being converted into a movie theater in 1935. A 1944 fire gave the owners an opportunity to update the appearance of the building – giving the theater its current vernacular art deco appearance. When the movie theater closed in the early 1980s, a group of concerned citizens stepped in to save the building a turn it into a community theater.
MAKING REPAIRS
The stucco exterior dating back to 1944 began to crack presenting a threat to the underlying materials and also to the interior of the building if water begins to penetrate the stucco. Preservation Maryland received a grant application from the Theatre and made an award of $10,000 in April 2017 to make needed stucco repairs. Getting the exterior secured is an important first step for the organization as they continue to plan for the preservation of this community institution.
MORE ABOUT THE HERITAGE FUND
The Heritage Fund, a cooperative effort of Preservation Maryland and the Maryland Historical Trust, provides direct assistance for the protection of historical and cultural resources and promotes innovative demonstration projects that can be successfully replicated to meet Maryland’s historic preservation needs. The Fund is intended to serve the needs of tangible cultural resources in Maryland. Historic sites, buildings, districts, objects, and archaeological resources are all eligible for funding.