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Lecture Tour of America 1882

Writing and Research on Oscar Wilde

St. Joseph

Missouri

Tootle's Opera House

Tuesday, April 18, 1882

The Decorative Arts

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Verification

Newspaper report

The St. Joseph Daily Gazette, April 19, 1882, 1

Newspaper advertisement

The St. Joseph Daily Gazette, April 18 1882

Venue

Tootles Opera House

504 Francis Street (at Fifth), St. Joseph, MO

Built: 1871 (Milton Tootle; architect Angelo Powell)

Opened: December 9, 1872

Seating capacity: 1500

Remodeled: 1923 as commercial office block

Later: The Pioneer Building, 502-514 Francis Street, St. Joseph, MO, 64501

Destroyed (fire): November 21, 2016 and subsequently demolished

Related:

Saving Places

Accommodation

The World's Hotel

12th and Penn Streets, St. Joseph, MO

Built: 1858 (as The Patee House)

Building extant: as Patee House Museum*

* A museum of communications and transportation. The building served as the eastern terminus of the Pony Express; the cannon which inaugurated the opening of the Express was fired in front of this building on April 3, 1860.

In the museum’s Blue Room the ‘George Warfel Westerners on Wood’ art collection features more than 40 life-sized portraits of famous westerners including Jesse James, who was shot dead in St. Joseph two weeks before Wilde's lecture.

Wilde wrote to Norman Forbes Robertson and an unidentified correspondent from The World's Hotel on April 19, describing the aftermath of the Jesse James shooting (Letters, 164).

See Oscar Wilde In America Blog: Pony Tale

Related source:

Patee House Museum

John Cooper on Oscar Wilde © 2026