Milestones Icon: Dickens Opera House

In the late 1880s, if you wanted something done, you probably turned to William Henry Dickens.

Not because of his relationship to Charles Dickens (his adoptive mother married the English novelist’s grandson), but because the Longmont rancher and freighter was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the area.

The Victorian building he constructed as a bank and opera house in 1881 still stands at the corner of Third Avenue and Main Street in Longmont. Approximately 150 “opera houses” were built in Colorado between 1860 and 1920. The Dickens is the fourth-oldest surviving opera house in the state.

It features an…